A thread of Applebaum’s book that really interested me were these prevailing and sometimes dueling senses of glorification and “sanitization” or censorship that are explored especially in the fourth chapter, with regards to all forms of media and propaganda: monuments, holidays, films, magazines, etc. The erection of statues and other monuments (and the subsequent shame and destruction of them in the post-Stalinist Czech period) was a massive undertaking, and one that capitalized on the extreme veneration of Stalin and the careful erasure of soldiers’ suffering and trauma. What, really, is the role of monuments in a historical context, especially considering the brevity of some of these statues’ lifespans? Their destruction shows the hefty erasing work on the part of the Czechoslovak government after Stalin’s influence dwindled, but this is not to commandeer the significant erasing going on during his period of reign, too. Holidays like May 9th, the “Day of the Liberation of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Army,” worked actively to “explicitly [usurp] the role Czechoslovaks had played fighting the Nazis, and further [entrench] the Soviets’ chronology of the conflict” (86). Films ignored the brutal humanity of wartime experienced by Soviet soldiers: “combat scenes lack[ed] emotion and tension” (87). Articles published in popular Czech magazines were notorious for how they “gloss[ed] over the typical emotional and physical experiences of war: exhaustion, hunger, pain, injury, fear, and grief” (87). This rewriting of history and the massively hyperbolic heroization of Soviet loyalists is a complicated and interesting phenomenon. What was the need for this sanitization? Wouldn’t you expect people to see through the exaggerative efforts undertaken by the country and the government? Why did they feel compelled to believe and participate in this rhetoric? What do you make of the post-Stalinist experience of continuing to erase?
Through the Iron Curtain
