The Thing Begins | Part 3

So now the board is set and the pieces are in place. In the East, the battle-hardened, seemingly endless divisions of the Red Army, backed by the ruthless and pitiless Joseph Stalin and his state-driven terror. In the West, the idealistic to the point of naïveté allies and their game-changing pika-dons, the nuclear flash-booms that had turned Stalin’s relentless ambition into a pillar of salt. As he tapped his unlit pipe and smoothed his iconic mustache, Stalin was sure that while the West had the Bomb, they did not possess the will to use it; the Americans would not trade Boston for Berlin. Stalin wouldn’t invade because he wouldn’t have to; he’d move the Iron Curtain to keep the Allies out of Berlin. It was a blockade that the West could never get through... but one that they just might be able to get over.

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Don’t skip the terror

Bill’s moving account of an ordinary day at the Lubyanka, and other communist torture dungeons always stands out as a tribute to those millions who were disappeared. Other, longer cold war histories seem lacking in gritty details and the reader is left with a bloodless recital of the numbers. The numbers boggle, to be sure, but the terror, that was the whole story.