Beginning in 1944, Stalin undertook the almost unimaginable project of politically and culturally subjugating the vast, extremely heterogeneous territory — Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and East Germany — that the Soviet Union had rolled over during World War II and then declined to give up. The brutal thoroughness and speed with which Stalin went about this doomed project is meticulously recorded and analyzed by Anne Applebaum (who also wrote the definitive Gulag) in pitiless detail: the crushing of the Catholic Church, the demonization of intellectuals, the suborning of the population to spy on itself, the absolute control of the media — in Poland one could be, and was, executed for having an unlicensed radio. Along with everything else, Applebaum reminds us of something it’s easy to forget: at the time, it looked like the project would succeed.