FORUM The Cold War and East-Central Europe, 1945–1989 ✣ Commentaries by Michael Kraus, Anna M. Cienciala, Margaret K. Gnoinska, Douglas Selvage, Molly Pucci, Erik Kulavig, Constantine Pleshakov, and A. Ross Johnson Reply by Mark Kramer and V´ ıt Smetana Mark Kramer and V´ ıt Smetana, eds. Imposing, Maintaining, and Tearing Open the Iron Curtain: The Cold War and East-Central Europe, 1945–1989. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014. 563 pp. $133.00 hardcover, $54.99 softcover, $54.99 e-book. EDITOR’S NOTE: In late 2013 the publisher Lexington Books, a division of Rowman & Littlefield, put out the book Imposing, Maintaining, and Tearing Open the Iron Curtain: The Cold War and East-Central Europe, 1945–1989, edited by Mark Kramer and V´ ıt Smetana. The book consists of twenty-four essays by leading scholars who survey the Cold War in East-Central Europe from beginning to end. East-Central Europe was where the Cold War began in the mid-1940s, and it was also where the Cold War ended in 1989–1990. Hence, even though research on the Cold War and its effects in other parts of the world—East Asia, South Asia, Latin America, Africa—has been extremely interesting and valuable, a better understanding of events in Europe is essential to understand why the Cold War began, why it lasted so long, and how it came to an end. A good deal of high-quality scholarship on the Cold War in East-Central Europe has existed for many years, and the literature on this topic has bur- geoned in the post-Cold War period. Even so, what makes Imposing, Main- taining, and Tearing Open distinctive is not only the many years of detailed knowledge the contributors bring to bear but also their ability to draw exten- sively on newly declassified archival sources from the former Soviet bloc and from Western countries as well as recently published memoirs and interviews. The authors also make us of existing scholarship and contemporaneous pub- lished sources, but their access to a wide range of declassified archival materials allows them to trace events more closely, comprehensively, and accurately. Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 19, No. 2, Spring 2017, pp. 158–214, doi:10.1162/JCWS_c_00723 C  2017 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 158