If you read Anne Applebaum's Iron Curtain as a manual on how to take over a state and turn it totalitarian, the first lesson, she says, would be on targeted violence. Applebaum's book, which was recently nominated for a National Book Award, describes how after World War II, the Soviet Union found potential dissidents everywhere.
"It really meant anybody who had a leadership role in society," she tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "This included priests, people who had been politicians, people who had been merchants before the war, and people who ran youth groups."
The Soviets tried to control as many aspects of life as possible in the Eastern European countries they took over, Applebaum says. Everything was a potential source of dissent. "If you say, 'All painters have to paint like this because the state says so,' and then when one painter says, 'I don't want to do it that way; I want to paint an abstract painting,' then you've made him into a political dissident, even if in another society, he would have been apolitical," she says.
There were also efforts to control mass media, and radio in particular. "The radio was definitely the one institution that all of the communist parties cared about controlling right away," says Applebaum. "They believed very deeply in the power of radio, and they believed in the power of propaganda, and of their own ability to convince people."
Some of the radio shows were question-and-answer programs filled with praise for Soviet activities. Other call-in programs invited callers to share their problems; the solution always involved the Communist Party. As the shows became cruder and more propagandistic, they'd simply broadcast leaders' speeches, Applebaum says. "Or they would broadcast interviews with happy workers and happy peasants who agreed with everything the party was doing."
Interview Highlights:
On show trials
"They began in the Soviet Union. ... They were trials of communist leaders and officials who were accused of spying, or they were accused of being traitors ... and they were scripted in advance, so the suspect would be beaten or tortured or bribed or otherwise convinced to go along with the process. He would then be examined on the witness stand according to a predetermined text; This would all be put on the radio, it'd be recorded in the newspapers, and he would confess to a series of crimes. ...
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Anne Applebaum is a columnist for The Washington Post and Slate. Her 2003 book, Gulag: A History, won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.