Author : Susan Viets
Publisher : Delfryn Publishing and Consulting Incorporated
Page : 262 pages
File Size : 41,97 MB
Release : 2012
Category : Berlin Wall, Berlin, Germany, 1961-1989
ISBN : 9780987966407
Based on diaries, reporting notebooks, letters and memory, the author, a student turned journalist, tells of her adventures in Europe within a ten-year period (1988 to 1998) which included major historical and political change in countries such as Budapest, Bishkek, Chornobyl and Chechnya. She finishes her stories with an eyewitness account of Ukraine's Orange Revolution in 2004.
Author : Anne Applebaum
Publisher : Anchor
Page : 803 pages
File Size : 50,49 MB
Release : 2012-10-30
Category : History
ISBN : 0385536437
In the long-awaited follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag, acclaimed journalist Anne Applebaum delivers a groundbreaking history of how Communism took over Eastern Europe after World War II and transformed in frightening fashion the individuals who came under its sway. At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union to its surprise and delight found itself in control of a huge swath of territory in Eastern Europe. Stalin and his secret police set out to convert a dozen radically different countries to Communism, a completely new political and moral system. In Iron Curtain, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Applebaum describes how the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were created and what daily life was like once they were complete. She draws on newly opened East European archives, interviews, and personal accounts translated for the first time to portray in devastating detail the dilemmas faced by millions of individuals trying to adjust to a way of life that challenged their every belief and took away everything they had accumulated. Today the Soviet Bloc is a lost civilization, one whose cruelty, paranoia, bizarre morality, and strange aesthetics Applebaum captures in the electrifying pages of Iron Curtain.
Author : Jaroslav Svelch
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 401 pages
File Size : 24,68 MB
Release : 2023-09-19
Category : Games & Activities
ISBN : 026254928X
How amateur programmers in 1980s Czechoslovakia discovered games as a medium, using them not only for entertainment but also as a means of self-expression. Aside from the exceptional history of Tetris, very little is known about gaming culture behind the Iron Curtain. But despite the scarcity of home computers and the absence of hardware and software markets, Czechoslovakia hosted a remarkably active DIY microcomputer scene in the 1980s, producing more than two hundred games that were by turns creative, inventive, and politically subversive. In Gaming the Iron Curtain, Jaroslav Švelch offers the first social history of gaming and game design in 1980s Czechoslovakia, and the first book-length treatment of computer gaming in any country of the Soviet bloc. Švelch describes how amateur programmers in 1980s Czechoslovakia discovered games as a medium, using them not only for entertainment but also as a means of self-expression. Sheltered in state-supported computer clubs, local programmers fashioned games into a medium of expression that, unlike television or the press, was neither regulated nor censored. In the final years of Communist rule, Czechoslovak programmers were among the first in the world to make activist games about current political events, anticipating trends observed decades later in independent or experimental titles. Drawing from extensive interviews as well as political, economic, and social history, Gaming the Iron Curtain tells a compelling tale of gaming the system, introducing us to individuals who used their ingenuity to be active, be creative, and be heard.
Author : Astrid Kirchhof
Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Press
Page : 324 pages
File Size : 25,71 MB
Release : 2019-06-05
Category : History
ISBN : 0822986485
In Nature and the Iron Curtain, the authors contrast communist and capitalist countries with respect to their environmental politics in the context of the Cold War. Its chapters draw from archives across Europe and the U.S. to present new perspectives on the origins and evolution of modern environmentalism on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The book explores similarities and differences among several nations with different economies and political systems, and highlights connections between environmental movements in Eastern and Western Europe.
Author : Astrid M. Eckert
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 445 pages
File Size : 21,10 MB
Release : 2019-09-02
Category : History
ISBN : 0190690062
West Germany and the Iron Curtain takes a fresh look at the history of Cold War Germany and the German reunification process from the spatial perspective of the West German borderlands that emerged along the volatile inter-German border after 1945. These border regions constituted the Federal Republic's most sensitive geographical space where it had to confront partition and engage its socialist neighbor East Germany in concrete ways. Each issue that arose in these borderlands - from economic deficiencies, border tourism, environmental pollution, landscape change, and the siting decision for a major nuclear facility - was magnified and mediated by the presence of what became the most militarized border of its day, the Iron Curtain. In topical chapters, the book addresses the economic consequences of the border for West Germany, which defined the border regions as depressed areas, and examines the cultural practice of western tourism to the Iron Curtain. At the heart of this deeply-researched book stands an environmental history of the Iron Curtain that explores transboundary pollution, landscape change, and a planned nuclear industrial site at Gorleben that was meant to bring jobs into the depressed border regions. The book traces these subjects across the caesura of 1989/90, thereby integrating the "long" postwar era with the post-unification decades. As Eckert demonstrates, the borderlands that emerged with partition and disappeared with reunification did not merely mirror some larger developments in the Federal Republic's history but actually helped to shape them.
Author : Matthew Longo
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 329 pages
File Size : 29,96 MB
Release : 2023-11-07
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0393540782
The gripping story of a collective passion for freedom that shook the world. In August 1989, a group of Hungarian activists organized a picnic on the border of Hungary and Austria. But this was not an ordinary picnic—it was located on the dangerous militarized frontier known as the Iron Curtain. Tacit permission from the highest state authorities could be revoked at any moment. On wisps of rumor, thousands of East German “vacationers” packed Hungarian campgrounds, awaiting an opportunity, fearing prison, surveilled by lurking Stasi agents. The Pan-European Picnic set the stage for the greatest border breach in Cold War history: hundreds crossed from the Communist East to the longed-for freedom of the West. Drawing on dozens of original interviews—including Hungarian activists and border guards, East German refugees, Stasi secret police, and the last Communist prime minister of Hungary—Matthew Longo tells a gripping and revelatory tale of the unraveling of the Iron Curtain and the birth of a new world order. Just a few months after the Picnic, the Berlin Wall fell, and the freedom for which the activists and refugees had abandoned their homes, risked imprisonment, sacrificed jobs, family, and friends, was suddenly available to everyone. But were they really free? And why, three decades since the Iron Curtain was torn down, have so many sought once again to build walls? Cinematically told, The Picnic recovers a time when it seemed possible for the world to change. With insight and panache, Longo explores the opportunities taken—and the opportunities we failed to take—in that pivotal moment.
Author : Patrick Wright
Publisher : OUP Oxford
Page : 747 pages
File Size : 37,99 MB
Release : 2009-10-28
Category : History
ISBN : 0191622842
'From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. . .' With these words Winston Churchill famously warned the world in a now legendary speech given in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946. Launched as an evocative metaphor, the 'Iron Curtain' quickly became a brutal reality in the Cold War between Capitalist West and Communist East. Not surprisingly, for many years, people on both sides of the division have assumed that the story of the Iron Curtain began with Churchill's 1946 speech. In this fascinating investigation, Patrick Wright shows that this was decidedly not the case. Starting with its original use to describe an anti-fire device fitted into theatres, Iron Curtain tells the story of how the term evolved into such a powerful metaphor and the myriad ways in which it shaped the world for decades before the onset of the Cold War. Along the way, it offers fascinating perspectives on a rich array of historical characters and developments, from the lofty aspirations and disappointed fate of early twentieth century internationalists, through the topsy-turvy experiences of the first travellers to Soviet Russia, to the theatricalization of modern politics and international relations. And, as Wright poignantly suggests, the term captures a particular way of thinking about the world that long pre-dates the Cold War - and did not disappear with the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Author : Anne Applebaum
Publisher : Signal
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 42,94 MB
Release : 2013-08-13
Category : History
ISBN : 0771007647
In the long-awaited National Book Award--shortlisted follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize--winning Gulag, acclaimed journalist Anne Applebaum delivers a groundbreaking history of how Communism took over Central Europe after WW II and transformed in frightening fashion the individuals who came under its sway. At the end of WW II, 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 completed. Applebaum draws on newly opened European archives and personal accounts translated for the first time to portray in devastating detail millions of individuals trying to adjust to a way of life that challenged their every belief, rendered worthless their every qualification, and took away everything they had accumulated. Today the Soviet Bloc is a lost civilization, one whose cruelty, paranoia, bizarre morality and strange aethestics Applebaum captures in the electrifying pages of this book.
Author : Philip White
Publisher : Public Affairs
Page : 306 pages
File Size : 45,93 MB
Release : 2012-03-06
Category : History
ISBN : 1610390598
Provides the dramatic history of Winston Churchill's 1946 trip to Fulton, Missouri, where he delivered his Iron Curtain Speech--a speech which served to fundamentally define the dangers of Soviet totalitarian Communism.
Author : Dóra Vargha
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 267 pages
File Size : 24,42 MB
Release : 2018-11
Category : History
ISBN : 1108420842
Through the lens of polio, Dóra Vargha looks anew at international health, communism and Cold War politics. This title is also available as Open Access.
