Curtain of Lies

Abstract

Curtain of Lies examines the role of truth in the political culture of the Cold War by looking at Eastern Europe during the period from 1948–1956. It examines how actors on both sides of the Iron Curtain tried to delineate the “truth” of Eastern Europe and how this worked to set the parameters of knowledge about the region. Eastern Europe’s Communist governments, under the guidance of the Soviet Union, tried to convince their citizens that the West was the land of imperialist warmongers and that Communism would bring a glorious future to the region. Their propaganda efforts were challenged by competing discourses emanating from the West, which claimed that Eastern Europe was a totalitarian land of captive slaves, powerless in the face of Soviet aggression. Curtain of Lies investigates the ways that ordinary East Europeans were affected by and contributed to these two ways of thinking about their homelands, concentrating on the interactions between refugees who illegally fled Eastern Europe in the early 1950s and American-sponsored radio stations that broadcast across the Iron Curtain. These broadcasters interviewed refugees as sources of knowledge about life under Communist rule. Careful analysis of these interviews shows, however, that the meanings East European émigrés gave to their own experiences could be influenced by what they had heard on Western broadcasts. Broadcasters and their listeners (who also served as their sources) mutually reinforced their own assumptions about the meaning of Communism, helping to create the evidentiary foundation for totalitarian interpretations of Communist rule in Eastern Europe.