How long does it take to read Iron Curtain?
The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-56
Iron Curtain by Anne Applebaum takes about 11 hours 30 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 11 hours 30 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 2012. 627 pages, about 172,425 words.
23 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 19 hours 10 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 11 hours 30 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 7 hours 11 minutes |
The page count is the median across 18 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
In the follow-up to her previous book "Gulag," the author, a journalist delivers a 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. Josef Stalin and his secret police set out to convert a dozen radically different countries to Communism, a completely new political and moral system. In this book, the author 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 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 is captured in the pages of this book.
Subjects: Politics and government, Political culture, Social conditions, History, Relations, Political persecution
