Truth and Lies across the Iron Curtain

Abstract

Truth and Lies across the Iron Curtain Rósa Magnúsdóttir Melissa Feinberg, Curtain of Lies: The Battle over Truth in Stalinist Eastern Europe. xxii + 232 pp. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. ISBN-13 978-0190644611. $74.00. Melissa Feinberg has written an excellent book about political culture in Stalinist Eastern Europe. Curtain of Lies: The Battle over Truth in Stalinist Eastern Europe is a timely book that focuses on fear, lies, and truth; themes that are all too familiar in contemporary political culture, dominated by ideological populism and fake (i.e., untrue) news. But more importantly, Curtain of Lies is also a welcome addition to the historiography on East European, Soviet, and Cold War history, as it joins a body of works that complicate the notion of resistance and demonstrate the porousness of the Iron Curtain.1 Additionally, it is transnational history at its best, with a focus on families, communities, ideologies, and regions instead of political borders, nations, policies, and states. Two opposite ideologies, communism and capitalism, dominated the political culture of the Cold War. To strengthen their propaganda, both communist regimes and the United States adopted a simple vocabulary of opposites meant to create loyalty and faith in their respective ideological projects. "Telling the truth about socialism" became a catchphrase in Soviet propaganda, at home and abroad, but even if both sides "spoke in terms of truth and lies, factual accuracy was usually not their primary concern" (xi). [End Page 649] These propaganda strategies of "truth telling," which implicitly and explicitly always relied on the concept of lying, had much to do with the fear that dominated the Cold War.2 In the war-torn regions of Eastern Europe, the regimes encouraged fear of a new war in order to create support for Soviet peace campaigns. In return, Americans painted a general picture of East Europeans as paralyzed by fear, not daring to take control of their own lives as they lived in a state of surveillance and terror.3 Both of these "fear campaigns" served the purposes of the respective superpowers; to secure and sustain support for their rule at home as well as to justify the costly propaganda campaigns in the early years of the Cold War. Feinberg's study shows how East Europeans adapted to these fears, and how they influenced the campaigns, focusing on flows of ideas rather than top-down strategies and bottom-up reactions. One example, related to the well-documented fear of a new war, shows that some people created a "fantasy of war as liberation" (127), where a war would free East Europeans from oppression.4 This kind of fantasy relied on the conviction that nuclear weapons would erase Soviet territory but not the satellite states. Interestingly, most people were convinced of a US victory in any of the imagined war scenarios, clearly not taking for granted that Soviet accomplishments in World War II could be repeated. These fantasies, as well as fantasies of a painless nuclear war, Feinberg describes as a coping strategy; as such, the war fantasies are indicative of one way in which East Europeans made sense of the available sources of information from both West and East in their everyday lives. In Feinberg's narrative, people's experiences are at the center: what was it like to live in Eastern Europe, and how did the superpowers' battle over truth inform people's way of life? Curtain of Lies provides a balanced account of how some East Europeans, while living under Stalinist control, took note of the situation in the West and "used, adapted, manipulated, and shaped political discourses from both sides of the Iron Curtain in order to make sense of their own experience" (xix). Feinberg thus challenges the prevalent [End Page 650] dichotomy of the historical literature in that agency is not an either/or question about oppression or resistance. Rather, Feinberg argues, we need to look at the sources of information available to East Europeans and understand how they informed people's approaches to their everyday lives. She finds that just as people's survival strategies were dependent on them navigating the "transnational political culture of the Cold War" (xv), East...