I know I am praising these authors for writing a rarefied brand of history, and that there will always be a market for books that simply tell a ripping yarn without a couple of hundred pages of scholarly apparatus at the end. But the rarefied brand has uses other than establishing the impeccable scholarly credentials of the author, and helping him or her to a higher doctorate or an even more exalted chair. It also, because of the depths of the research such works contain, challenges existing views of the subjects, and challenges them by offering a more complete selection of facts than was hitherto available.

In Applebaum's book, for example, her chapter on the ethnic cleansing of Eastern Europe, mainly to remove Germans from lands other than Germany, but also to get Poles out of Ukraine, provides evidence (were any needed) that the persecution of Europe's Jews did not end with the defeat of the Nazis, or indeed start on any direct order from the region's new master, Stalin. The locals, without help or direction from any extra-territorial authority, were quite capable of doing it too. 

Her reconstruction of the protests in Berlin in June 1953 also remind us that, more than three years before the Hungarian uprising, the oppressed people of the Soviet bloc were determined to try to shake off their shackles. Such research is not always considered sexy by publishers, but it makes the most vital contribution to our knowledge of the period and the region.