And also be helpful for the newspaper industry. Host one more question. Guest again, you talked a little bit about it but what effect will timeshifting people view things over the internet on Linear Program channels . Guest its going to have an impact but i believe broadcasters because of the publics values they serve, because its free and because its local, we are a survivor. When television came along everybody said radio was dead. When the internet came along and cable and satellite everyone said broadcast is dead and now we are still very much alive and well in both radio and television because we have an architecture and a niche that is hugely important and obviously capturing the eyeballs of the American People . Host where you sit at the seat of National Broadcasters what is the job Going Forward . Guest to preserve channels that are not interfered with in sufficient volume that we can innovate in the future and provide these remarkable new television experiences, which are not just the near horizon, but they are here. And within this decade you will see Television Sets for which you cannot imagine. I have been to the labs in tokyo and is better than 3d. Its not even for k. , its ak and its also highdefinition. Its astonishing. The American People should not be denied that because we are somehow cannibalized out of some sort of new Public Policy that says the world is far as broadband and broadcast. Host senator gordon smith joins us as we began discussions on the future of television and he is president and ceo of the National Association of broadcasters. Thank you, sir. And ted gotsch from Telecommunications Report thank you for being on the communicators. This week on q a, pulitzer prizewinning author Anne Applebaum discusses her newest historical narrative entitled iron curtain subfive. Cspan Anne Applebaum why do you open up with the quote from Winston Churchill . Guest i open up of the quote because churchill is defined an era where talking about probably without meaning to. He coined the expression the iron curtain and it was such a motive and such, and such an evocative description of what had happened between 1944 and 1946 when he gave his speech that the quote comes from and i thought it was important to put that at the beginning of the book. Cspan did you ever find out why he called at the iron iron iron curtain . Guess so theres x. A long and complicated story. Its actually a theatrical term. There was an iron curtain at theaters that he could use. They would put down the iron curtain to prevent fires in the theater so the term was kicking around in victorian england as an iron curtain and it was viewed by other people but it was churchill who used it first in the private communications with his american counterparts and then later in that speech. Cspan do you know why he was was speaking in fold missouri . Guest he was doing a favorite of harry truman who was, that is where chairman was from. Cspan lets watch a slice of that speech so we can get a feeling for what it was like. In the adriatic the iron curtain has behind lines and the ancient states of central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, berlin, prague, vienna, budapest, belgrade, bucharest and yugoslavia. All these famous cities and the populations around them. Cspan why did you want to write about it . Guest i was in the way inspired by my first book. In no way one in of my first books that my previous book which was about the gulag system. It represents a continuation of the that i had after writing the book. One of the things i got interested about was why people went along with it and why did people go along with totalitarian regimes . What is the institutional pressure, why did camp guards do what they were told to do . Why does it happen . I decided to write about this period right after world war ii because its a time when the soviet union was then had reached a kind of height. There was a sort of of stalinism and stalinism was created throughouthroughou t the 1920s and 30s and then it was reinforced by the experience of the war. By 1945, it was a fully developed system with a clinical theory and an economic theory and a clear ideology. It was exactly at this moment when the red army marched into Central Europe and began imposing a system on the Central European stage. You can see how from scratch, what did the soviets think their system was . What did they think was important to do first and how did they try to. Cspan where did they get the rights to march into Eastern Europe . Guest they were the victors in the war. Hitler had invaded germany in 1941 and a font back against the germans and they kept going to berlin. Cspan defines stalinism. Guest stalinism was a developed system as i say in it was a system of complete control. The stalinist state believed he could control everything. He could control not only politics and not only economics but it could control social life and it could control civic life. It could control sports clubs and chess clubs. In the stalinist system, there were no independent institutions of any kind and no independent voices of any kind were allowed to speak. All the economy was under state control and all of society was. And there was a cultural aspect. The arts were under stalinist control and there was also it cult of stalins portraits that hung everywhere. All of society was organized around his name and his image. Cspan i grew up in a small town in indiana and one of the main streets in my neighborhood was chriss street. Its not the way you pronounce it but you talk about radio causes in here. We never knew what causes was. Guest he was a hungarian hero of 1948, of an earlier period and much raid later on radio causes, this is the later part of my story, was in 1956, free hungarian radio and they adopted the name of a previous hungarian liberating hero and they applied it to that radio. That was in 1956, stalinist radio. Cspan in 1956 what were the circumstances . Guest 56 is the end of the stalinist period. By 1956 arty dead. He died in 53 nasty 53 people wanted to reform the system. In 1956 you had the revival of what i just described. Stalinism when it was brought into Eastern Europe it was an attempt to put everything under state control. 56 was really the revenge of Civil Society when people began reorganizing itself and reorganizing social life. Independently and spontaneously and among other things creating independent Radio Stations. Cspan you said in your pocket take you six years to do this. Guest it depends how you count. Cspan what i want you to do is take a little time, back up and tell us what you went through. Where you went and what you were trying to find out and how you did this book. Guest as i said, the idea was i wanted to explain how totalitarianism happened. We do know the story of the cold war. We know that the documents we had seen and our times describe between roosevelt, stalin, churchill and truman and we know the main event main event from our point of view. What i wanted to do was show from a different angle, from the ground up, what did it feel like to be one of the people who were subjected to the system and how did people make choices in that system and how did they react . And so, i started very systematically. I went through archives in warsaw come in berlin and budapest. I look to government archives and i looked at party archives. I looked at the Police Archives all of which are now open. Open. Some are easier to use than others and some countries give you better or worse access in some archives closed and basically in this part of the world the archives are and and a list of specific institutions, so i looked at the hung gary and Film Industry and which was one of the biggest and most powerful Film Industries in europe in the 1930s as we know because so many of its leaders were in this country during the war. How did you become a social realist Film Industry. I looked at german painters and germany had a very vibrant expression, abstract art in the 1920s and 30s destroyed by hitler. They went abroad and they came back to berlin thinking they would be able to paint who they wanted. They discover to their horror that actually they were not going to be allowed to so how did they react and what did they do . Some of them taught himself painting and they try to paint and social realist in stalins way. I looked at economic questions, and in particular i was interested in small shops in retailing and this was in some ways the hardest part of the economy to control. I looked at the files of the industry of economics in germany and poland. I looked at the secret police documents because i was looking for the origins of the secret police. How was it created . Who were the people who were the original secret police and where did they come from and how were they trained . I went through all this and in addition to this i use soviet documents, some which have been published or had been made available in the 90s and arent available any more. There is a wonderful collection in warsaw in about 1991 or 92, the polish military Archive Center researcher and a couple of to moscow and they xeroxed all of the archives that had anything to do with the red army, the liberation of poland in 1944 and in particular its first encounters with the polish resistance. So its all xeroxed and you can read in warsaw. I dont even know if we documents are excessive on moscow. There was a tremendous amount of available and in a way my problem was what not to use. In addition to the archives, i as well. Cspan where you live do you live now . Guest i now live in warsaw although i spend a lot of time here. Cspan how old are your kids . Guest my kids are 15 and 12. Cspan where do they live . Guest they live some of the time in warsaw and from the time in london. My husband is a polish foreign minister. Cspan how did that happen . Guest he was a foreign minister when i met him. He was a journalist which was what i was in 1989 when i came to report on the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. We drove to berlin on a november night when the wall fell that i think sitting on the wall chipping away at it with a chisel. We got married a year later. Cspan what did that mean at that time . What it did feel like when the two of you were sitting there in that wall came down . Was at november 1989 . Guest 1989. First of all, people had forgotten how much fun it was to really it was very exhilarating at this time in history but they had also forgotten how nervous people were. I remember sitting on the wall and we were there, it was at 4 00 in the morning and everybody was awake and everything was open. There were many hundreds of people sitting on top of the berlin wall. The east east german guards was still there because there was a ball and then there was nomans land and there was a second wall. They were standing in between the two walls. And very nervous, wearing riot gear. At 4 00 in the morning everybody drank champagne and they had sung the national anthem. What do you do next so they started to rather drunkenly tease the guards. People started to jump off the wall from the west into the east and the guards would throw people back over the wall. And it wasnt entirely a satisfying moment. I discovered many years later that actually as we were sitting there, the east german politburo was trying to decide what to do with us, these people were sitting on the wall. So it could have all ended for us. Cspan we are going to run some video on your husband when he was on our show and he was with the American Enterprise. Here he is. Product sikorsky has been defense minister for how long . Six weeks and prior to that you have been living in the states, correct . I think in here washington. Before i was a deputy minister in the early 90s. Here in washington you are known as mr. Anne applebaum. I am proud to be married to and though. Cspan that was seven years ago. Guest he was so young. Cspan does he look that young today it is a foreign minister . Guest he looks wonderful. Cspan what does it mean that he is now the foreign minister of poland and how does that figure into all of your interest here are . Guest it doesnt figure in directly. I have a background of knowledge and sympathy for that region that i wouldnt have otherwise and i think he doesnt influence any direct way. He is not sitting with me in the archives while im looking up to see what happened to the film directors in 1947 and he would be too busy to even help me write my book. Knowing that region and having lived in it and having this 20 year long connection with it gives me some empathy or some interest in what happened there. Cspan what are the residuals from world war ii and the iron curtain period today in europe . In Eastern Europe. Anything . Guest is interesting, one of the things that has happened since 1989 is the region least to call Eastern Europe have become very differentiated. These countries no longer have anything in common with each other except for the common memory of communist occupation. Poland is different from bulgaria and albania as greece is from finland and europe is divided in different ways and has changed quite a lot. I would say there are a few elements though of a communist the communist past that you can see in postcommunist countries. Sometimes there is a paranoid elements and politics that comes from just a legacy of people being spied on and people having lived in an oppressive system. They are more paranoid about secret deals being done behind their backs. Secret deals were done behind their backs and that is untenable and there is an anxiety about being less behind or left out by the west and seem to be inside the western hands. The memory that continues to play out but in truth these countries are more different from one another than they are similar. Cspan you chose three of eight countries behind the iron curtain . And what were the three . Guest i chose poland, hungary and east germany . Cspan why those three . Guest i chose them because they were different because they have horse different historical backgrounds and they had a different political and mostly because they have very different experiences with war. Germany was of course not see germany and poland had resisted very strongly than not sees and one of the largest resistance movements in europe and the hungarians were somewhere in between. They were reluctant collaborators with a nod to set some point that they also had element so i was interested in having had the very different experiences of the previous five years, how did they now react to the soviet invasion and the subsequent process . Cspan how would you define the situation in each of those countries today . Their lifestyle, the economy, the openness, the democracy in all of that . Guest all three democracies, east germany and of course its part of germany and so its indistinguishable now in the legal system and west germany is much poorer than east germany and some wise poor than poland which has as a country, has covered more vigorously than the eastern part of germany. Poland is a very vibrant democracy and maybe to vibrant knowingly vibrant and it now plays it very important and central role in europe. Its a member of the e. U. And a member of nato and the largest of the Eastern European country so it has perhaps a larger role in that region than anybody else. Hungary is also still a democracy and its also a liberal capitalist state. Its a less happy place. It has been badly governed in the last 20 years, extraordinarily actually it is still in many ways, there are many hungarian institutions that havent been reformed very much since 1989 and now there is an unattractive far right in hungary. There is an unattractive left as well. Its a less happy and stable state but as they say it still democracy and a very open society. Cspan at what point in your research did you say, i didnt know that . Guest oh, constantly. I was constantly running into one of the things that happens when you read archives and when he read communist party archives, he discovered that behind closed doors communist officials are much more open than they are in public so they are always saying things to one another. They understand their society fairly well. They are driven by ideology and they believe in their ideology which is an important point. We often now tend to dismiss that. They were just mouthing these slogans. They were not mouthing them. They believe the politari and was coming and if we press the right buttons we will be able to create it. They are constantly surprised by what goes wrong. Is supposed to be happening this way. The peasants and workers are supposed to be supporting us and they should vote for us in these elections but they dont. Why . Whats wrong . They argue that we need more ideology and we need more of this and more that and we discover the factories are producing as much as they are supposed to be. Why not . Maybe we need Different Things and they are always looking for ways. They have the statistics and the evidence and they know what has gone wrong and they cant figure out how to fix fix it. It happens over and over again and that is the most surprising. Cspan how did the leaders live in those three countries compared to the politari and . Guest the leaders live in nice lady communities. They live in villas and they were cut off from society. In this period particularly they have access to privileges that may not seem so extraordinary to us but at that time they have indoor plumbing and they had access to all kinds of food when there were great shortages. The leaders were very isolated and very protected, often surrounded by servants, maids and chauffeurs who were employees of the state, employees of the interior ministry. So they were protected by all sides and there were also very nervous about my keen public appearances. They had a lot of bodyguards and they were anxious. Cspan how did that track with their idea that everybody should be equal . Guest its an interesting question. All the pigs are equal and some are more equal than others. This is one of the things that develop during the revolution. We are wor