Victory Square

For those of us who lived through the 'Cold War' and spent our childhood being taught to hide under desks and to 'duck and cover', these books are like a memoir of the other side of the coin. We now know how while America was enjoying the growth of the most consumer-friendly society the world has ever known, those behind the "Iron Curtain" were suffering the continuation of WW Two. All of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact nations, spent so much on the military and their internal security services, that little was left for the 'proletarian worker'. When I was in Prague and West Berlin in 1968, what struck me most, was to 'darkness and drabness' on the other side of the curtain. You could look into East Berlin and see buildings that still had bullet holes in them and how the streets were covered with a grey dust. The people all had a look in their eyes that was a mixture of fear and hunger. East Berlin looked like a post-apocalyptic city, but the apocalypse was communism. In Prague the people told me they listened to the BBC and watched American and British TV shows that were broadcast in West Germany. They couldn't believe the way people in the West lived. They were especially amazed when they watched Western documentaries that cited the plight of the poor in the West. Even the poor seemed to have cars, food, housing, running water and heat. Now granted that urban housing was run down, but to those in the East, the 'poor' lived pretty well, compared to the average mid-level communist bureaucrat. Steinhauer has done a magnificent job in documenting the life behind the Iron Curtain in its' day to day drabness and that's what makes this series of five books so important. Those of the new Post-Cold War generation, find the whole situation we lived through for forty years to be unbelievable. When I talk to my daughter's college friends, they are baffled by the stories I tell them of having been in Spain under Franco and Yugoslavia under Tito. They think of totalitarianism as nazis and fascists or some African despot, they find it incredible the lengths that the East Germans went to, to win medals at the Olympics and that one in five people worked for the Stasi (the East German secret police). When I read to them from Solzhnitsyn, they say they feel like I'm reading from an alternate universe. This is the real importance of Steinhauer's five books, they make the implausible real and readable. Zeb Kantrowitz

This is the last of Olen Steinhauer's series of novels about Eastern Europe between 1956 and the 1980's. All five books are excellent. This one might be my favorite, but the same characters appear throughout the series so I would recommend starting with "The Bridge of Sighs."

I hesitated before purchasing this, due to several disappointing reviews. I couldn't diagree with them more. This books wraps it all up in a very moving, evocative way. I was able to place myself in Steinhauer's Iron Curtain country as the wheels came off in the late '80s. The author conveys the sense of disorientation that must have been common to entire generations of people who had lived through those decades. My only quibble is that the point of view seems to shift from time to time without warning; sometimes in the middle of a paragraph. It's a little strange to switch from 1st person to 3rd and back again so abruptly. I don't know if this was always intentional, or just a lack of thorough editing. In any case, I found this to be a thoroughly compelling conclusion to a masterful, unique series. Bravo!!!

The best and final of the series. Steinhauer is one of the best and this book proves it.