Fluke Kelso, a dissipated, middle-aged former Oxford historian, who is in Moscow to attend a conference on the newly opened Soviet archives, receives in his hotel a very unexpected visitor.

How did the Soviet Union impose its communist ideology on the countries of Central and Eastern Europe after World War II? The story of how, from 1945 until the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, these countries were gradually subjected to the totalitarian Soviet yoke.