This is an impressive history of the Soviet Empire in East Central Europe during the Cold War. Two dozen essays by the cream of the crop of Cold War in Central Europe scholars are arranged in four parts, covering: (I) the outbreak of the Cold War in Central Europe and the establishment of the Iron Curtain; (II) Germany and the Warsaw Pact in the post-Stalin years; (III) ending the Cold War and East Central Europe's role in the revolutions of 1989; and (IV) long-term perspectives on the Cold War and its demise. Mark Kramer contributed four essays to this collection—some being material he has previously published in other venues—and thus makes them conveniently available to Cold War scholarship in one piece. The analytical power of Kramer's essays give this collection a solid core.

Parts I and IV, on the beginning and the end of the Cold War—namely “imposing” and “tearing open the iron curtain” in the title of the book—are particularly strong and coherent. Kramer's essay on the establishment of the Communist Bloc provides a list of ten parameters defining Stalinist control of East Central Europe, first and foremost among them Stalin's idea of “a protective zone against future invasions from European armies and a safeguard against the threat of revived German militarism” (11). Essays on the establishment of Soviet control in Hungary (László Borhi) and Czechoslovakia (Vít Smetana) demonstrate that the process of bringing the region under Soviet control worked differently in each country. Smetana stresses that Edvard Beneš threw himself willingly into the arms of Moscow during the war. Prague in 1945–46 rushed into the Soviet sphere of influence. Czechoslovakia “helped to start building the Soviet Empire—by invitation” (74), concludes Smetana quite laconically. Peter Ruggenthaler brushes off once and for all the myth of the famous “Stalin notes” of 1952 having been a serious attempt to neutralize and unify Germany. The “Stalin notes” originated with Walter Ulbricht in the GDR in 1951 and were directed at neutralists in the FRG to make the remilitarization of West Germany more difficult (156–57). The “Stalin notes” were a “diversionary maneuver” to anchor the GDR “irreversibly in the Soviet orbit” (161). Stabilization of the Eastern Bloc was their principal goal, not ending the Cold War deadlock, let alone unifying Germany.

Part II, on “maintaining” the iron curtain during the middle years of the Cold War (1960–80), is sketchy. One would have expected essays here on how the border regimes on both sides of the Iron Curtain were maintained, or reflections on the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (“Helsinki process”) and the advent of human rights demands in the Bloc (say, the role of Charta 77 in Czechoslovakia).

The chapters on the end of the Cold War (Parts III and IV) conclude the book. Tom Blanton continues his Reagan–Bush revisionism—debunking Reagan triumphalism. Reagan was never as belligerent as the triumphalists have it, he argues, and Bush was a “bystander” and slowed down the dramatic change going in Eastern Europe (298) rather than encouraged it. However, Blanton mistakes Bush's cautious and circumspect policies vis-à-vis the change in Eastern Europe for inaction. The essays on Mikhail Gorbachev's changing policy toward Eastern Europe are more balanced. Alex Pravda demonstrates how Moscow's new liberal order facilitated the changes in Eastern Europe with the promotion of perestroika in the Bloc. Svetlana Savranskaya provides a solid historical context for Moscow's politics during the fall of the Berlin Wall. Domestic reforms in Moscow in the spring of 1989 echoed the transformation of communism on the “model of the Prague Spring—socialism with a human face minus the tanks” (341). German unification obviated Gorbachev's dream of Russia ending up in the “common European home” (347). Mark Kramer's summary of the demise of the Soviet Bloc is based on massive new evidence from Soviet archives. He argues that from 1985 to 1988, Gorbachev followed traditional Soviet policies toward the Bloc, urging it to “defend socialist gains,” and never uttered a word that the Brezhnev Doctrine was obsolete (372). The turning point came in 1988, with the first public critiques of Soviet “hegemonism” in the public media (381) and the announcement of unilateral force reductions in Gorbachev's key UN speech in December.

The Kremlin's decisions not to intervene in Poland and Hungary in 1989 changed the game. Gorbachev was shocked by the violence the Chinese regime exercised in Tiananmen Square vis-à-vis young protesters. He strictly opposed such violence against popular movements in the Bloc (particularly in the GDR) in the course of 1989. Oldřich Tůma confirms the view that the Prague Spring acted as a milestone toward the transformation of Communism as exercised by Gorbachev twenty years later. Reforms of 1968 “opened the way” for 1989 (511). The revolutions of 1989 are explained as the result of many different factors both in the international arena and domestic politics in Moscow and the Bloc, along with the agency of people power in Eastern Europe. Cold War scholarship in the past decade or so has been concentrating on the Global South, but this fine collection of essays rightly refocuses our interest on East Central Europe, where the Cold War started and ended.