Mart Laar's book 'The Power of Freedom' offers an unprecedentedly compact overview of the history of Central and Eastern Europe since 1945. The author covers topics ranging from war strategies, mass deportations, command economy, Red Terror and anti-communist resistance in Eastern Europe, to independence movements and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and reasoning why communism fails and freedom works; all delivered by a historian who lived on the isolated side of the Iron Curtain.