For this reason, the process was a gradual one. Instead of imposing a Soviet-style planned economy from the start, in most countries they tolerated small business and peasant farmers. Communist party membership, tiny at first, mushroomed. Behind the scenes the moves were more sinister: Communists took control of the interior ministry, particularly the secret police and the radio, in those pre-television days the sole means of mass communication. 

By the gruesome standards of the time, this was small potatoes. With the full consent of the Western allies and with the support of local majority populations the new rulers also conducted ethnic cleansing: Germans in huge numbers and with great brutality were sent home to Germany. Poles from the country's eastern regions (then in the Soviet Union) took their place. Tens of thousands of people died. Countless numbers were raped and robbed. Nobody made much fuss about it.

In the chaos of defeat, few paid much attention to the niceties of property rights either. The Communists launched popular programmes of land redistribution and nationalised heavy industry, promising better conditions for the workers. That, they hoped, would give people a persuasive foretaste of the paradise ahead.

But parliamentary elections, from 1945 onwards, conveyed a different message; a hugely shocking one for the region's new masters. The despised "bourgeois" parties, despite systematic harassment and myriad bureaucratic obstacles, did well-and increasingly so over time. Voters wanted radical reforms, social justice and a new start — but not Soviet-style Communism. For people who believed they had an inviolable mandate from history, that was an intolerable setback. It also infuriated their masters in Moscow. 

What followed was a gruesome imposition of totalitarian rule, in the real (rather than lazy, rhetorical) sense of the term. Multiparty politics was abandoned. Political parties had to merge with the Communists, to accept a role as puppets, or fold. Independent media closed. The tentacles of Communist power spread from the secret police to every part of government: Applebaum gives a chilling description of how a series of arrests persuaded Hungary's census office to abandon its principled refusal to provide its files to the secret police.