Top Qs
Timeline
Chat
Perspective

Anne Applebaum

American historian (born 1964) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Anne Applebaum
Remove ads

Anne Elizabeth Applebaum[2][3] (born July 25, 1964) is an American journalist and historian. She has written about the history of Communism and the development of civil society in Central and Eastern Europe. She became a Polish citizen in 2013.

Quick Facts FRSL, Born ...

Applebaum has worked at The Economist and The Spectator magazines,[4] and she was a member of the editorial board of The Washington Post (2002–2006).[5] She won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 2004 for Gulag: A History.[6] She is a staff writer for The Atlantic magazine,[7] as well as a senior fellow of the Agora Institute and the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University .[8]

Remove ads

Early life and education

Summarize
Perspective

Applebaum was born in Washington, D.C. to a reform Jewish family, the eldest of three daughters of Harvey M. and Elizabeth Applebaum.[2][9] Her father, a Yale alumnus, is senior counsel in the antitrust and international trade practices at Covington & Burling. Her mother was a program coordinator at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. According to Applebaum, her great-grandparents immigrated to North America during the reign of Alexander III of Russia from what is now Belarus.[10]

After attending Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C., Applebaum entered Yale University; there she studied Soviet history under Wolfgang Leonhard during the fall semester of 1982.[11] While an undergraduate, she spent the summer of 1985 in Leningrad, Soviet Union (now Saint Petersburg, Russia), an experience that she credits with helping to shape her opinions.[12]

Applebaum received her BA from Yale in 1986 summa cum laude in history and literature.[13][11] She was the recipient of a two-year Marshall Scholarship at the London School of Economics, where she earned a master's degree in international relations (1987).[14] She also studied at St Antony's College, Oxford,[15] before becoming a correspondent for The Economist and moving to Warsaw, Poland, in 1988.[16]

In November 1989, Applebaum drove from Warsaw to Berlin to report on the collapse of the Berlin Wall.[17]

Remove ads

Career

Summarize
Perspective

As foreign correspondent for The Economist and The Independent, she covered the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of communism. In 1991 she returned to England to work for The Economist; she was later hired as the foreign editor and subsequently deputy editor of The Spectator, and later the political editor of the Evening Standard.[18] In 1994, she published her first book, Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe, a travelogue that described the rise of nationalism across the new states of the former Soviet Union.[19] In 2001, she interviewed prime minister Tony Blair.[20] She also undertook historical research for her book Gulag: A History (2003), about the Soviet prison camp system, which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.[6][21][22] It was also nominated for a National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times book award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.[23]

Quick Facts External videos ...

Applebaum has been a member of the editorial board of The Washington Post,[5] and she was a columnist for the newspaper for seventeen years.[24] In addition, she was an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.[25]

Her second history book, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944–56, was published in 2012 by Doubleday (in the US) and Allen Lane (in the UK); it was nominated for a National Book Award and shortlisted for the 2013 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award.[26] From 2011 to 2016, she created and ran the Transitions Forum at the Legatum Institute, an international think tank and educational charity based in London. Among other projects, she ran a two-year program examining the relationship between democracy and growth in Brazil, India, and South Africa;[27] created the Future of Syria[28] and Future of Iran projects[29] on institutional change in those countries; and commissioned a series of papers on corruption in Georgia,[30] Moldova,[31] and Ukraine.[32]

With Foreign Policy magazine she created Democracy Lab, a website focusing on countries in transition toward or away from democracy;[33] this later became Democracy Post[34] at The Washington Post. She also ran Beyond Propaganda,[35] a program examining 21st century propaganda and disinformation. Started in 2014, the program anticipated later debates about "fake news". In 2016, she left Legatum because of its stance on Brexit after the Euroskeptic Philippa Stroud was appointed as CEO;[36] Applebaum then joined the London School of Economics (LSE) as a professor of practice at the Institute for Global Affairs. At the LSE, she ran Arena, a program on disinformation and 21st century propaganda.[37] In the autumn of 2019, she moved the program to the Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University.[8]

In October 2017, she published her third history book, Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine, a history of the Holodomor (the 1932–1933 human-made famine in Soviet Ukraine). The book won the Lionel Gelber Prize[38] and the Duff Cooper Prize,[39] making her the only author to win the Duff Cooper Prize twice.[40]

In November 2019, The Atlantic announced that Applebaum would join the publication as a staff writer starting in January 2020.[24] She was included in Prospect magazine's 2020 list of the top 50 thinkers for the COVID-19 era.[41]

Quick Facts External videos ...

In July 2020, her book Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism was published. Partly a memoir and partly political analysis, it was on the bestseller lists of Der Spiegel magazine[42] and The New York Times.[43] Also in July 2020, Applebaum was one of 153 signers of the "Harper's Letter" (also known as "A Letter on Justice and Open Debate"); this expressed concern that "the free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted."[44]

In November 2022, Applebaum was one of 200 US citizens who were sanctioned by Russia for "promotion of the Russophobic campaign and support for the regime in Kiev."[45]

Applebaum is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.[46] She is also on the boards of the National Endowment for Democracy and Renew Democracy Initiative.[47][48] She was a member of the international board of directors of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting.[49] In addition, she was a Senior Adjunct Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), where she co-led a major initiative aimed at countering Russian disinformation in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE).[50] She was also on the editorial boards of The American Interest magazine[51] and the Journal of Democracy.[52][when?]

Remove ads

Positions

Summarize
Perspective

Soviet Union and Russia

According to Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Applebaum has been active as a political commentator highly critical of Russia and Putin’s regime."[53] Ivan Krastev stated that the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall "was the point of departure of everything that Applebaum did in the following three decades...For her, the end of the Cold War was not a geopolitical story; it was a moral story, a verdict pronounced by history itself."[54]

Applebaum has been writing about the Soviet Union and Russia since the early 1990s. In 2000, she described the links between the then-new president of Russia, Vladimir Putin; the former Soviet leader Yuri Andropov; and the former KGB agency.[55] In 2008, she began speaking about Putinism as an anti-democratic ideology, though most people at the time still considered the Russian president to be a pro-Western pragmatist.[56]

Applebaum has been a vocal critic of Western conduct toward the Russian military intervention in Ukraine. In an article in The Washington Post on March 5, 2014, she maintained that the US and its allies should not continue to enable "the existence of a corrupt Russian regime that is destabilizing Europe", noting that the actions of President Vladimir Putin had violated "a series of international treaties".[57] On March 7, in another article on The Daily Telegraph, discussing an information war, Applebaum argued that "a robust campaign to tell the truth about Crimea is needed to counter Moscow's lies".[58] At the end of August, she asked whether Ukraine should prepare for "total war" with Russia and whether central Europeans should join them.[59] Critics of Applebaum's, including journalist Glenn Greenwald, have called her a "warmonger" and a "neocon".[60][61]

In 2014, she wrote a review of Karen Dawisha's book Putin's Kleptocracy for The New York Review of Books; in the review, she asked whether "the most important story of the past twenty years might not, in fact, have been the failure of democracy, but the rise of a new form of Russian authoritarianism".[62] She has described the "myth of Russian humiliation", and she argued that NATO and EU expansion have been a "phenomenal success".[63] In July 2016, before the US election, she wrote about connections between Donald Trump and Russia;[64] she wrote that Russian support for Trump was part of a wider Russian political campaign designed to destabilize the West.[65] In December 2019, she wrote in The Atlantic that "in the 21st century, we must also contend with a new phenomenon: right-wing intellectuals, now deeply critical of their own societies, who have begun paying court to right-wing dictators who dislike America."[66]

Central Europe

Applebaum has written about the history of central and eastern Europe, Poland in particular. In the conclusion to her book Iron Curtain, Applebaum argued that the reconstruction of civil society was the most important and most difficult challenge for the post-communist states of central Europe; in another essay, she argued that the modern authoritarian obsession with civil society repression dates back to Vladimir Lenin.[67] She has written essays on the Polish film-maker Andrzej Wajda;[68] the dual Nazi–Soviet occupation of central Europe;[69] and why it is inaccurate to define Eastern Europe as a single entity.[70]

Disinformation, propaganda and fake news

In 2014, Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev launched Beyond Propaganda, a program examining disinformation and propaganda, at the Legatum Institute.[71] Applebaum wrote about a 2014 Russian smear campaign against her while she was writing heavily about the Russian annexation of Crimea. She stated that dubious material posted on the web was eventually recycled by semi-respectable, American, pro-Russian websites.[72] Applebaum argued in 2015 that Facebook should take responsibility for spreading false stories and help to "undo the terrible damage done by Facebook and other forms of social media to democratic debate and civilized discussion all over the world".[73] Applebaum has been a member of the advisory panel for the organization Global Disinformation Index.[74]

Nationalism

In March 2016, eight months before the election of President Donald Trump, Applebaum wrote a column for The Washington Post asking, "Is this the end of the West as we know it?"; the column argued that "we are two or three bad elections away from the end of NATO, the end of the European Union and maybe the end of the liberal world order".[75] Applebaum endorsed Hillary Clinton's campaign for US president in July 2016, on the grounds that Trump is "a man who appears bent on destroying the alliances that preserve international peace and American power".[76]

Applebaum wrote a column in The Washington Post in March 2016 that led the Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger and the German magazine Der Spiegel to interview her. These articles appeared in December 2016[77][78] and January 2017. She was among the first to argue that the international populist movement frequently labeled as "far right" or "alt right" was not actually conservative as this term has traditionally been defined. She wrote that populist groups in Europe share "ideas and ideology, friends and founders"; unlike Burkean conservatives, they seek to "overthrow the institutions of the present to bring back things that existed in the past—or that they believe existed in the past—by force."[79] Applebaum has underlined the danger of a new "Nationalist International", a union of xenophobic, nationalist parties such as Law and Justice in Poland, the Northern League in Italy, and the Freedom Party in Austria.[80]

In January 2022, Applebaum was invited to testify before the Foreign Affairs Committee of the US House of Representatives; the committee hearing was titled "Bolstering Democracy in the Age of Rising Authoritarianism".[81]

Remove ads

Personal life

In 1992, Applebaum married Radosław Sikorski, who later served as Poland's Minister of National Defence, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Marshal of the Sejm, and as a member of the European Parliament. Applebaum's husband is currently serving as Minister of Foreign Affairs in Donald Tusk's Third Cabinet. The couple have two sons, Aleksander and Tadeusz.[82] Applebaum gained Polish citizenship in 2013;[83] she speaks Polish and Russian in addition to English.[84]

In July 2025 Anne Applebaum delivered the opening address at the Salzburg Festival.[85][86][87]

Remove ads

Awards and honors

Remove ads

Selected publications

  • Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe, Pantheon, (1994), reprinted by Random House, 1995; Penguin, 2015; and Anchor, 2017, ISBN 0679421505
  • Gulag: A History, Doubleday, (2003), 677 pages, ISBN 0-7679-0056-1; paperback, Bantam Dell, 2004, 736 pages, ISBN 1-4000-3409-4
  • Gulag Voices : An Anthology, Yale University Press, (2011), 224 pages, ISBN 9780300177831; hardback
  • Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956, Allen Lane, (2012), 614 pages, ISBN 978-0-713-99868-9 / Doubleday ISBN 978-0-385-51569-6
  • From a Polish Country House Kitchen, Chronicle Books, (2012), 288 pages, ISBN 1-452-11055-7; hardback
  • Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine, Penguin Randomhouse, (2017)[108][53]
  • Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, Doubleday, (2020), 224 pages, ISBN 978-0385545808; hardback
  • Wybór (Choice), Agora, (2021), 320 pages, ISBN 978-8326838255; hardback
  • Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, Doubleday, (2024), 224 pages, ISBN 978-0385549936; hardback
Remove ads

References

External links

Loading related searches...

Wikiwand - on

Seamless Wikipedia browsing. On steroids.

Remove ads
Remove ads