Anne Applebaum: Losing the battle against propaganda

In retrospect, the battle lines of the Cold War - the West, NATO and democracy on one side; the East, the Warsaw Pact and dictatorship on the other - seem obvious and inevitable. The outcome - the collapse of the U.S.S.R. - feels now as if it were preordained. But at many moments in the half-century that the Cold War lasted, the battle lines were far from clear and the ultimate outcome very much in doubt.Certainly in the immediate aftermath of World War II, when communist parties were still stro