Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe (2012) and Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe (1994) by Anne Applebaum
Anne Applebaum’s recent book is so good, I’ve been working my way through her back catalogue.
Two books about the “borderlands” of Europe – Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, Hungary, Belarus and Moldova – their crushing and Sovietization following 1944, and subsequent re-emergence in the 90s are excellent if you have an interest the region, its history, and the recent destablilisation.
Pure joy, and the best non-fiction book I’ve read this year
For the history, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-56 is as detailed as a PhD thesis but as readable as a novel. The grimness is almost hallucinatory: read about how scouting groups were considered counter-revolutionary projects (which lead to some of them taking up arms!), and how to be sent to the Gulag for 10 years for starting a democracy club in your school at the age of 15.
But pure joy, and the best non-fiction book I’ve read this year, is Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe.
This just appeals to all my favourite things: Applebaum took a highly unofficial, and probably illegal journey from the Baltic to Istanbul during the early 90s during the collapse of the Soviet Union, riding on the back of trucks, bribing taxi drivers to cross borders, many of which had just been drawn up.
Many of the people she meets have never met an American; she meets a man who only speaks in patriotic Polish poetry; Ukrainian nationalists, Ruthenian Nationalists, nationalists of tiny countries in the mountains of the carpathians; caviar smugglers.
A meditation on ethnicity, borders, nationalism, and ethnic cleansing from the 13th to the 20th century. I was supposed to cycle through western Ukraine this year so determined to get there next yearโฆ