8 PIOTR H. KOSICKI
historical sociology of movement formation, and it also draws
heavily on the national historiographies of the countries that it
examines. The result is a broad lens on the present state of re-
search (covering all relevant languages), with hopes to propel
that research forward.
All of the chapters draw on both non-English-language sec-
ondary literature and original primary sources—some published,
some archival—with the most extensive sourcework coming for
the two countries for which the least scholarship exists. Paradox-
ically, these are the two cases that differ most substantially from
other Communist-run countries: Poland, for its overwhelmingly
Catholic population following the annihilation or displacement
of its pre–World War II Jewish, German, and Ukrainian nation-
al minorities; and Yugoslavia, for the unique nonaligned status
achieved by its postwar leader Josip Broz “Tito,” who governed
the country until his death in 1980.
The Iron Curtain and the Catholic Church
By the time of Nazi Germany’s surrender on May 8, 1945, the
Red Army and its satellite armies from across Central and East-
ern Europe had marched westward into the heart of Germany,
taking Berlin and establishing a zone of occupation that would
serve as the basis for the postwar partitions of Berlin, Germany,
and the whole of Europe.17 Historians still disagree about when
exactly the Cold War began, but by March 1946—when former
British prime minister Winston Churchill famously declared that
“an iron curtain has descended across the continent”—Red Army
boots seemed to have come to stay in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia,
eastern Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania.
- Norman M. Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone
of Occupation, 1945–1949 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 1995). - See, for example, Norman M. Naimark and Leonid Gibianskii, eds., The Estab-