Download or read book Retracing the Iron Curtain A 3 000 Mile Journey Through the End and Afterlife of the Cold War written by Timothy Phillips and published by The Experiment, LLC. This book was released on 2023-03-07 with total page 551 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Across 3,000 miles and over eight decades, this epic new people’s history of the Cold War makes eye-opening sense of a defining 20th-century conflict—and how it continues to shape our world today. Initially a victory line where Allies met at the end of World War Two, the Iron Curtain quickly became the front of a new kind of war. It divided Europe from north to south for a staggering forty-five years. Crossing it in either direction was always a political act; in many cases, it was a crime to even talk about doing so. New generations have grown up since these borders came down, freed from the restrictions of the Cold War era. But what has the Iron Curtain left in its wake? Timothy Phillips travels its full 3,000-mile route—from inside the Arctic Circle to where Armenia meets Azerbaijan and Turkey—to craft this epic new people’s history of a defining 2oth-century conflict. Here, in the borderlands where a powerful clash of civilizations took form in concrete and barbed wire, he uncovers the remarkable stories of everyday people forever imprinted by life in the Curtain’s long shadow. Some look back on the era with nostalgia, even affection, while others despise it, unable to forgive the decades of hardship their families and nations endured. A director recalls the astonishing night his movie premiered in East Germany—November 9, 1989, the very night the Berlin Wall fell. And a railroad worker recounts the 1951 hijacking of a passenger train from Czechoslovakia that breached the Curtain, granting those aboard immediate asylum in the West. These narratives, by turns harrowing and heartening, paint a vivid portrait of the new Europe that emerged from the ruins. Phillips reveals the Iron Curtain’s profound impact on our world today—even as he punctures the fault lines we draw. Publisher’s note: This book was published in the UK under the title The Curtain and the Wall.
Download or read book Daily Life behind the Iron Curtain written by Jim Willis and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2013-01-24 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This compelling book describes how everyday people courageously survived under repressive Communist regimes until the voices and actions of rebellious individuals resulted in the fall of the Iron Curtain in Europe. Part of Greenwood's Daily Life through History series, Daily Life behind the Iron Curtain enables today's generations to understand what it was like for those living in Eastern Europe during the Cold War, particularly the period from 1961 to 1989, the era during which these people-East Germans in particular-lived in the imposing shadow of the Berlin Wall. An introductory chapter discusses the Russian Revolution, the end of World War II, and the establishment of the Socialist state, clarifying the reasons for the construction of the Berlin Wall. Many historical anecdotes bring these past experiences to life, covering all aspects of life behind the Iron Curtain, including separation of families and the effects on family life, diet, rationing, media, clothing and trends, strict travel restrictions, defection attempts, and the evolving political climate. The final chapter describes Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin wall and the slow assimilation of East into West, and examines Europe after Communism.
Download or read book The Iron Curtain written by Bruce L. Brager and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2004 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Visiting Central Europe, in 1962, a visitor would not see a real "Iron Curtain." There was no huge piece of grim drapery splitting Europe between Communist dictatorships and democracies. The Iron Curtain represented the Central European part of the Cold War, the generally peaceful, but highly dangerous, forty-year competition between the United States and its allies and the Soviet Union and its allies. The Iron Curtain symbolically represented the attempt to permanently, artificially, and arbitrarily split one part of Central Europe from the other. Although there was no real iron curtain, there was lots of steel in the form of barbed wire, ground radar, watchtowers, and machine guns in the hands of troops willing to use them. The boundary between democracy and totalitarianism was clear. This book tells the story of the Iron Curtain, and the Cold War it so vividly represented, from the start of World War II to its end with the dramatic fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Book jacket.
Download or read book Burned Bridge written by Edith Sheffer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines "Burned Bridge," the intersection between two sister cities in East and West Germany, and reveals how the daily adjustments of anxious residents shaped the barrier that divided them.
Download or read book The Red Line written by Christopher Knowles and published by Casemate Publishers. This book was released on 2017-04-30 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Red Line is the story of a train journey from London to Hong Kong. It is set in 1981, the year Christopher made the first of twenty-four such journeys as a tour guide, when the Cold War was still very much a fact of life. Although China appeared to be on the brink of significant change, no one could know for certain; Poland was stirring but the prospect of change in the USSR and its other allies seemed remote. This made a journey by train across that landscape particularly fascinating, because by using standard, scheduled services that together created one of the longest possible railway routes, one was necessarily immersed in the various countries in ways that otherwise would have been impossible. Equally fascinating were the reactions of Western travelers to finding themselves incarcerated for weeks on end in the eccentric world behind the Iron Curtain.In order to give the journey some coherence, the most memorable events over those years have been condensed into a single journey and the most notable personalities, plucked from various times and places, have been thrown together. To emphasize the fact that these events took place in the recent past, and to be able to show how extraordinarily quickly the world has changed in the few intervening years, the story is told by a narrator. Everything that occurs is true, although some circumstances have been slightly adapted for the sake of fluency and names of individuals have been changed.
Download or read book Iron Curtain written by Anne Applebaum and published by Signal. This book was released on 2012-10-30 with total page 802 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the end of WWII, the Soviet Union, to its surprise and delight, found itself in control of a huge swath of territory in Central Europe. It set out to convert a dozen radically different countries to a completely new political and moral system, Communism. Iron Curtain describes how the communist regimes of Eastern Europe were created, and what daily life was like once they were complete. Applebaum draws on newly opened European archives and personal accounts translated for the first time to portray in devestating detail millions of individuals trying to adjust to a way of life that challenged their every belief, rendered worthless their every qualification, and took everything away they had accumulated. Today the Soviet Block is a lost civilization, once whose cruelty, paranoia, bizarre morality and strange aethestics Applebaum captures in the electrifying pages of this book.
Download or read book Uprising in East Germany 1953 written by Christian F. Ostermann and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2001-01-06 with total page 495 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is the second in the series Cold War Documentary Readers, a project of the US National Security Archive and the Cold War International History Project. The volume is the first documented account of this early Cold War crisis from both sides of the Iron Curtain. Based on the recent unprecedented access to the once-closed archives of several member states of the Warsaw Pact, this collection of primary-source documents presents one of the most notorious events of post-war European history in a highly readable format. Previously unreleased Kremlin records, once highly classified American documents, materials from the Soviet Foreign Ministry, and transcripts of internal East German Communist Party Politburo meetings in the days leading to the uprising in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) are among the highlights of this sensational documentary. In this volume, as in the previous one in the series, each part is preceded by a detailed introductory essay to provide the necessary historical and political context. The individual documents are introduced by short headnotes summarizing the contents and orienting the reader. A chronology, glossary and bibliography offer further background information.
Download or read book Iron Curtain written by and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Produced by Nugus/Martin-52 minutes, B/W, Color.
Download or read book The Iron Curtain written by Igor Gouzenko and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2016-11-11 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1948, this book is the autobiographical account of the cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko who defected from the Russian Embassy in Ottawa on 5 September 1945, just three days after war end. In doing so he alerted the Canadian, British and American authorities to the spy rings operating in Canada which were made up of traitorous intellectual professionals and men who belonged to the social and academic establishment of Canada, confirming what Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers were telling the FBI in the late 1940’s about spy rings in the USA. A profound and gripping story of one “little man” risking his life for the greater good of protecting the heritage of freedom that many others take for granted.. “We have been impressed with the sincerity of the man, and with the manner in which he gave his evidence, which we have no hesitation in accepting.... “In our opinion Gouzenko by what he has done has rendered great public service to the people of this country, and thereby has placed Canada in his debt.”—The Report of the Royal Commission to investigate the facts relating to and the circumstances surrounding the communication, by public officials and other persons in positions of trust of secret and confidential information to agents of a foreign power. June 27, 1946.
Download or read book Cold War Crossings written by Patryk Babiracki and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-20 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Approaching the early decades of the “Iron Curtain” with new questions and perspectives, this important book examines the political and cultural implications of the communists’ international initiatives. Building on recent scholarship and working from new archival sources, the seven contributors to this volume study various effects of international outreach—personal, technological, and cultural—on the population and politics of the Soviet bloc. Several authors analyze lesser-known complications of East-West exchange; others show the contradictory nature of Moscow’s efforts to consolidate its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe and in the Third World. An outgrowth of the forty-sixth annual Walter Prescott Webb Lectures, hosted in 2011 by the University of Texas at Arlington, Cold War Crossings features diverse focuses with a unifying theme.
Download or read book The Curtain and the Wall written by Timothy Phillips and published by . This book was released on 2023-09-07 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Iron Curtain written by Anne Applebaum and published by Penguin Classics. This book was released on 2013 with total page 613 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union unexpectedly found itself in control of a huge swathe of territory in Eastern Europe. Stalin and his secret police set out to convert a dozen radically different countries to a completely new political and moral system- Communism. Anne Applebaum's landmark history of this brutal time shows how societies were ruthlessly eviscerated by Communist regimes, how opposition was destroyed and what life was like for ordinary people who had to choose whether to fight, to flee or to collaborate. Iron Curtainis an exceptional work of historical and moral reckoning, and a haunting reminder of how fragile freedom can be. Chosen 16 times as a 'Book of the Year' - The top Non-Fiction pick of 2012'The best work of modern history I have ever read.' A. N. Wilson, Financial Times'The outstanding book of the year . . . a masterpiece.' Oliver Kamm, The Times, Books of the Year 'Exceptionally important, wise, perceptive, remarkably objective.' Antony Beevor 'Explains in a manner worthy of Arthur Koestler what totalitarianism really means . . . it is a window into a world of lies and evil that we can hardly imagine.' Edward Lucas, Standpoint 'At last the story can be told . . . a magisterial history.' Orlando Figes, Mail on Sunday
Download or read book The Lost World of Communism written by Peter Molloy and published by BBC Books. This book was released on 2009 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 1989 was a year of revolution: it marked the collapse of communism in Eastern and Central Europe and an end to an entire way of life for millions of people behind the Iron Curtain. This title collects testimony of the people who lived in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania during the Cold War era.
Download or read book The Icon Curtain written by Yuliya Komska and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-02-02 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Iron Curtain did not exist. Instead, it comprised multiple regional segments, many in the grip of divergent historical and cultural forces for decades, if not centuries. The first cultural studies account of the border's landscape, 'The Icon Curtain' straddles the Bohemian Forest to uncover a far-reaching genealogy of one such section and debunk the stereotype of the unprecedented mid-twentieth-century partition. There, between the 1950s and 1980s, West German locals and Sudeten German expellee newcomers shaped a civilian rampart, the 'prayer wall'.
Download or read book Curtain of Lies written by Melissa Feinberg and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Curtain of Lies' examines the role of truth in the political culture of the Cold War by looking at Eastern Europe during the period from 1948-1956. It examines how actors on both sides of the Iron Curtain tried to delineate the 'truth' of Eastern Europe and how this worked to set the parameters of knowledge about the region
Download or read book The Fall of the Berlin Wall written by 50 minutes and published by 50Minutes.com. This book was released on 2017-01-31 with total page 43 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Keen to learn but short on time? Get to grips with the history of the Berlin Wall in next to no time with this concise guide. 50Minutes.com provides a clear and engaging analysis of the fall of the Berlin Wall.When the Berlin Wall was built unexpectedly in 1961, it divided the city for 28 years, separating families and friends for almost three decades. The Wall was a symbol of the divisions in Germany and Europe that followed the Second World War as well as a reminder of the stringent Communist regime. The fall of the wall was, therefore, cause for huge celebration: families were reunited, East Berliners were finally free of the strict communist regime and the biggest symbol of the East-West divide had collapsed. In just 50 minutes you will: • Understand why the Berlin Wall was built and what its purpose was • Learn about the events leading up the fall of the Berlin Wall and how a miscommunication caused it to fall a day early • Analyse the impact that the wall had on Berlin, Germany and the whole of Europe and why its collapse was so significant ABOUT 50MINUTES.COM | History & Culture 50MINUTES.COM will enable you to quickly understand the main events, people, conflicts and discoveries from world history that have shaped the world we live in today. Our publications present the key information on a wide variety of topics in a quick and accessible way that is guaranteed to save you time on your journey of discovery.
Download or read book Iron Curtain Rising written by Peter Laufer and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looks at how the revolutionary changes in Eastern Europe are affecting the everyday lives of its citizens, and describes how Eastern Europe still differs from the West.
