Window Shopping Through the Iron Curtain
Window Shopping Through the Iron Curtain

Author: David Hlynsky

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2015-02-10

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 0500252114

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A deadpan celebration of the unique commercial aesthetic that flourished under the crumbling totalitarian Communist regimes of twentieth-century Europe Window-Shopping through the Iron Curtain presents a selection of more than 100 images of shop windows shot by David Hlynsky during four trips taken between 1986 and 1990 to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, East Germany, and Moscow. Using a Hasselblad camera, Hlynsky captured the slow, routine moments of daily life on the streets and in the shop windows of crumbling Communist countries. The resulting images could be still-lifes representing the intersection of a Communist ideology and a consumerist, Capitalist tool—the shop window—with the consumer stuck in the middle. Devoid of overt branding or calculated seduction, the shop windows were typically adorned with traditional yet incongruous symbols of cheer: homey lace curtains, paper flowers, painted butterflies, and pictures of happy children. Some windows were humble in their simple offerings of loaves and tinned fishes; others were zanily artistic, as in the modular display of military shirts in a Moscow storefront; and some illustrated intense professional pride, such as a sign in a Prague beauty salon depicting a pedicurist smiling fiendishly over an imperfect sole. The photographs are accompanied by essays by art historian Martha Langford and cultural studies specialist Jody Berland, as well as Hlynsky’s own account of his time as a flâneur in the shopping plazas of the collapsing Soviet empire—“a vast ad-hoc museum of a failing utopia” that in 1989 began to close forever.

Nature and the Iron Curtain
Nature and the Iron Curtain

Author: Astrid Kirchhof

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2019-06-05

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 0822986485

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In Nature and the Iron Curtain, the authors contrast communist and capitalist countries with respect to their environmental politics in the context of the Cold War. Its chapters draw from archives across Europe and the U.S. to present new perspectives on the origins and evolution of modern environmentalism on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The book explores similarities and differences among several nations with different economies and political systems, and highlights connections between environmental movements in Eastern and Western Europe.

Iron Curtain
Iron Curtain

Author: Anne Applebaum

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2012-10-30

Total Pages: 803

ISBN-13: 0385536437

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In the long-awaited follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag, acclaimed journalist Anne Applebaum delivers a groundbreaking 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. Stalin and his secret police set out to convert a dozen radically different countries to Communism, a completely new political and moral system. In Iron Curtain, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Applebaum 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 devastating 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 Applebaum captures in the electrifying pages of Iron Curtain.

Gaming the Iron Curtain
Gaming the Iron Curtain

Author: Jaroslav Svelch

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2023-09-19

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 026254928X

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How amateur programmers in 1980s Czechoslovakia discovered games as a medium, using them not only for entertainment but also as a means of self-expression. Aside from the exceptional history of Tetris, very little is known about gaming culture behind the Iron Curtain. But despite the scarcity of home computers and the absence of hardware and software markets, Czechoslovakia hosted a remarkably active DIY microcomputer scene in the 1980s, producing more than two hundred games that were by turns creative, inventive, and politically subversive. In Gaming the Iron Curtain, Jaroslav Švelch offers the first social history of gaming and game design in 1980s Czechoslovakia, and the first book-length treatment of computer gaming in any country of the Soviet bloc. Švelch describes how amateur programmers in 1980s Czechoslovakia discovered games as a medium, using them not only for entertainment but also as a means of self-expression. Sheltered in state-supported computer clubs, local programmers fashioned games into a medium of expression that, unlike television or the press, was neither regulated nor censored. In the final years of Communist rule, Czechoslovak programmers were among the first in the world to make activist games about current political events, anticipating trends observed decades later in independent or experimental titles. Drawing from extensive interviews as well as political, economic, and social history, Gaming the Iron Curtain tells a compelling tale of gaming the system, introducing us to individuals who used their ingenuity to be active, be creative, and be heard.

Daily Life behind the Iron Curtain
Daily Life behind the Iron Curtain

Author: Jim Willis

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2013-01-24

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13:

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This compelling book describes how everyday people courageously survived under repressive Communist regimes until the voices and actions of rebellious individuals resulted in the fall of the Iron Curtain in Europe. Part of Greenwood's Daily Life through History series, Daily Life behind the Iron Curtain enables today's generations to understand what it was like for those living in Eastern Europe during the Cold War, particularly the period from 1961 to 1989, the era during which these people-East Germans in particular-lived in the imposing shadow of the Berlin Wall. An introductory chapter discusses the Russian Revolution, the end of World War II, and the establishment of the Socialist state, clarifying the reasons for the construction of the Berlin Wall. Many historical anecdotes bring these past experiences to life, covering all aspects of life behind the Iron Curtain, including separation of families and the effects on family life, diet, rationing, media, clothing and trends, strict travel restrictions, defection attempts, and the evolving political climate. The final chapter describes Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin wall and the slow assimilation of East into West, and examines Europe after Communism.

Through the Iron Curtain
Through the Iron Curtain

Author: Eva Wonka

Publisher:

Published: 2021-02-18

Total Pages: 116

ISBN-13:

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Who wants to come on a trip behind the Iron Curtain...The Global Adventures Series bring exciting, dangerous, and true stories about men and women who served God faithfully and lived a life for His glory.Smuggling the Bible into former communist countries...Traveling to foreign places without knowing the language...Teaching the Bible secretly among Christians in Romania...Experiencing the dangers of the Secret Police...Learning to trust the Lord to do the impossible...In this edition, hear the riveting stories about Tom, David, Margareta and Jozef.Who wants to come with me on a trip behind the Iron Curtain?

Polio Across the Iron Curtain
Polio Across the Iron Curtain

Author: Dóra Vargha

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-11

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 1108420842

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Through the lens of polio, Dóra Vargha looks anew at international health, communism and Cold War politics. This title is also available as Open Access.

Iron Curtain Rising
Iron Curtain Rising

Author: Peter Laufer

Publisher:

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13:

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Looks at how the revolutionary changes in Eastern Europe are affecting the everyday lives of its citizens, and describes how Eastern Europe still differs from the West.

The Iron Curtain Over America
The Iron Curtain Over America

Author: John Beaty

Publisher: Lulu.com

Published: 2016-10-13

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 1365459780

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This book is unique in that it not only discusses the internal decay and the external disasters which threaten the life of American people (in fact, of ALL the people), but diagnoses the growing cancer of which they are merely the symptoms. Going behind the iron curtain of propaganda, censorship and deception, the author, former Colonel of the Military Intelligence Service, gives to the reader the first comprehensive documented account of the origin, the scope, and the intentions of the "insidious forces working from within," which are seeking to destroy Western civilization. "An honest and courageous dispeller of the fog of propaganda in which most minds seem to dwell." - Lt. General P. A. Del Valle, USMC (ret.) "I think it ought to be compulsory reading in every public school in America." - Senator William A. Langer, former Chairman, Judiciary Committee "This book is a magnificent contribution to those who would preserve our American ideals." - Lt. Gen. Edward M. Almond, USA (ret.)

Imposing, Maintaining, and Tearing Open the Iron Curtain
Imposing, Maintaining, and Tearing Open the Iron Curtain

Author: Mark Kramer

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2013-11-22

Total Pages: 583

ISBN-13: 0739181866

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The Cold War began in Europe in the mid-1940s and ended there in 1989. Notions of a “global Cold War” are useful in describing the wide impact and scope of the East-West divide after World War II, but first and foremost the Cold War was about the standoff in Europe. The Soviet Union established a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe in the mid-1940s that later became institutionalized in the Warsaw Pact, an organization that was offset by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) led by the United States. The fundamental division of Europe persisted for forty years, coming to an end only when Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe dissolved. Imposing, Maintaining, and Tearing Open the Iron Curtain: The Cold War and East-Central Europe, 1945–1989, edited by Mark Kramer and Vít Smetana, consists of cutting-edge essays by distinguished experts who discuss the Cold War in Europe from beginning to end, with a particular focus on the countries that were behind the iron curtain. The contributors take account of structural conditions that helped generate the Cold War schism in Europe, but they also ascribe agency to local actors as well as to the superpowers. The chapters dealing with the end of the Cold War in Europe explain not only why it ended but also why the events leading to that outcome occurred almost entirely peacefully.