What Are You Currently Reading? 2013

[carl]

I read Peter G. MacDonald’s biography of Giap earlier in the year. Didn’t that jump land all of them in POW camps (and from to their graves for many of them)?

That is what David marveled at, me too. They knew what the odds and they went anyway.

Maybe the motivation was what I read motivates most things like that, they can't stand to leave their mates unaided.

[carl]

I am just finishing Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956 by Applebaum.

http://www.amazon.com/Iron-Curtain-C...tain+applebaum

The book is excellent. It is comprehensive and very readable. More than readable really. The author manages to convey what those people went through in a deeper sense than a mere recounting of history.

The Soviets managed to subjugate, pacify if you will, a number of disparate countries with disparate cultures in a very short time. And a lot of those countries didn't have much use for Russians or Communists. That was a remarkable achievement.

The book recounts how they did it and some of things critical to that accomplishment are a bit surprising to me. For example the mass rapes helped them. Those along with all the other brutalities functioned to terrorize the populations right from the start. Also all the ethnic cleansing and ethnic killing that we see in so many places today, was seen in Eastern Europe at the end of the war, on a vast scale.

I recommend it highly, for several reasons. First, modern people tend to forget what brutes the Soviets were. Second, despite that, they pulled off a hell of a trick in subjecting all those countries and I think it important that we realize that. Third, though ultimately all they did depended upon the Red Army being there, there was a lot more to it than that. Fourth, it is darned interesting.