Curtain of Lies

The Battle over Truth in Stalinist Eastern Europe

Melissa Feinberg

Offers a different perspective on the Cold War by showing the connections and transfers between Communist and capitalist worlds
Highlights the activities of East European émigrés and exiles and their role in constructing Western knowledge about the Soviet bloc
Shows how East European government officials, journalists, and party activists tried to shape the ways their populations understood the capitalist West
Examines how the rhetoric of truth and lies was central to early Cold War politics

Curtain of Lies

The Battle over Truth in Stalinist Eastern Europe

Melissa Feinberg

Description

While the Cold War governments of Eastern Europe operated within the confines of the Soviet worldview, their peoples confronted the narratives of both East and West. From the Soviet Union and its satellites, they heard of a West dominated by imperialist warmongers and of the glorious future only Communism could bring. A competing discourse emanated from the West, claiming that Eastern Europe was a totalitarian land of captive slaves, powerless in the face of Soviet aggression.
In Curtain of Lies, Melissa Feinberg conducts a timely examination into the nature of truth, using the political culture of Eastern Europe during the Cold War as her foundation. Focusing on the period between 1948 and 1956, she looks at how the "truth" of Eastern Europe was delineated by actors on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Feinberg offers a fresh interpretation of the Cold War as a shared political environment, exploring the ways in which ordinary East Europeans interacted with these competing understandings of their homeland. She approaches this by looking at the relationship between the American-sponsored radio stations broadcast across the Iron Curtain and the East European émigrés they interviewed as sources on life under Communism. Feinberg's careful analysis reveals that these parties developed mutually reinforced assumptions about the meaning of Communism, helping to create the evidentiary foundation for totalitarian interpretations of Communist rule in Eastern Europe. In bridging the geopolitical and the individual, Curtain of Lies provides a perspective that is both innovative in its methodology and indispensable to its field.

Curtain of Lies

The Battle over Truth in Stalinist Eastern Europe

Melissa Feinberg

Introduction: Two Camps, Two Truths

Chapter 1: Telling Lies, Making Truth
Chapter 2: The Battle for Peace
Chapter 3: Battling the Big Lie
Chapter 4: That Funny Feeling Creeping Down Your Back
Chapter 5: Soporific Bombs and American Flying Discs
Chapter 6: The Power of the Powerless

Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Curtain of Lies

The Battle over Truth in Stalinist Eastern Europe

Melissa Feinberg

Author Information

Melissa Feinberg is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is the author of Elusive Equality: Gender, Citizenship and the Limits of Democracy in Czechoslovakia, 1918-1950.

Curtain of Lies

The Battle over Truth in Stalinist Eastern Europe

Melissa Feinberg

Reviews and Awards

"Melissa Feinberg's fast-paced book, Curtain of Lies, delves into the question of truth as framed by the Cold War struggle in late Stalinist Eastern Europe. Based on an intriguing analysis of hundreds of Western interviews with East Europeans who fled the east for the west, Feinberg demonstrates that ideas of truth and falsehood emerged from a nexus of propaganda, counterpropaganda, radio broadcasting, and fantastic ideas of peace and war in West and East."--Norman M. Naimark, Robert and Florence McDonnell of East European Studies, Stanford University

"Written in clear, strong prose, Curtain of Lies delivers a fresh perspective on Cold War propaganda, revealing that the clichés of show trials and peace offensives articulated deep-set ideas about truth, belief, and fear."--Padraic Kenney, Professor of History and Chair of the Department of International Studies, Indiana University

"The originality of Feinberg's research lies in her close attention to the lived experience of the participants in the 'battles for truth' across the Iron Curtain. She attends to the manufacturing of official propaganda by agentda of the state, as well as o the dilemmas of daily life in a world of half-truths, lies, and fear"--William I. Hitchcock, Lawfare

"A fresh perspective on the formation of Cold War political culture in post-war eastern Europe and the United States is provided by Melissa Feinberg's fascinating analysis of a topic that has been discussed by many scholars before."--International History Review

"Feinberg usefully draws attention to the extent to which communist rule depended on beliefs and culture as distinct from actual violence."--Stephen Lovell, Times Literary Supplement