Yet as the screws tightened, the system increasingly failed. Productivity plummeted amid abysmal working conditions. Exhortation and propaganda were no substitute for proper wages. When in 1953 East German workers went on strike to demand a less punishing regime, the Soviet Union used tanks against them. Political repression turned inwards too: when the real class enemies and bourgeois nationalists were jailed, the secret police began hounding Communists instead, including some of the most grizzled veterans of the cause. Their dazed and fanciful confessions undermined the regime's legitimacy too: how was it possible that so many fascist hyenas had been able to nest for so long in the bosom of the party? Something was surely adrift. 

Paradoxically it was the belated funeral of one of the victims of the show trials, the loathsome secret police chief Laszlo Rajk, that fuelled the Hungarian reform Communists in 1956. His interment also buried Hungarian Stalinism, paving the way for the brief era of freedom that was crushed by the Soviet invasion.

That both doomed the Communist cause and demoralised its opponents. For the dogged anti-Communist activists from the Baltic to the Black Sea, the West's failure to intervene was a catastrophic disappointment. Only one choice remained: to make the best of things. Yet the repeated use of force destroyed the Soviet claim to the moral high ground. For the next 30 years, the rulers of Eastern Europe gnawed at knots they themselves had tied. Why was Communism not popular? Why didn't it work? Would another dose of liberalisation mean revolution and Soviet invasion? 

The result was a series of ad hoc experiments: more room for the Church in Poland; "Goulash Communism" in Hungary, intensified repression and the Berlin Wall in East Germany. The uniformity of "Eastern Europe" began to erode. As Applebaum notes "by the 1980s East Germany had the largest police state, Poland the highest church attendance, Romanians the most dramatic food shortages, Hungarians the highest living standards and Yugoslavia the most relaxed relationship with the West."