Anne Applebaum | |
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.jpg) Applebaum in 2024 | |
| Born | Anne Elizabeth Applebaum (1964-07-25)July 25, 1964 (age 61)[1] Washington, D.C., U.S. |
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| Education | |
| Known for | Writing onSoviet Union and itssatellite countries |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 2 |
| Awards | Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction |
| Website | www |
Anne Elizabeth Applebaum[2][3] (born July 25, 1964) is an American journalist and historian. She has written about thehistory of Communism and the development ofcivil society inCentral and Eastern Europe. She became aPolish citizen in 2013.
Applebaum has worked atThe Economist andThe Spectator magazines,[4] and she was a member of theeditorial board ofThe Washington Post (2002–2006).[5] She won thePulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 2004 forGulag: A History.[6] She is a staff writer forThe Atlantic magazine,[7] as well as a senior fellow of theSNF Agora Institute and theSchool of Advanced International Studies atJohns Hopkins University.[8]
Applebaum was born inWashington, D.C., to areform 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 atCovington & Burling. Her mother was a program coordinator at theCorcoran Gallery of Art. According to Applebaum, her great-grandparents immigrated to North America during the reign ofAlexander III of Russia from what is nowBelarus.[10]
After attendingSidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C., Applebaum enteredYale University; there she studied Soviet history underWolfgang Leonhard during the fall semester of 1982.[11] While an undergraduate, she spent the summer of 1985 inLeningrad, Soviet Union (now Saint Petersburg, Russia), an experience she says helped shape her opinions.[12]
Applebaum received herB.A. from Yale in 1986 in history and literature.[13][11] She received a two-yearMarshall Scholarship at theLondon School of Economics, where she earned a master's degree ininternational relations (1987).[14] She also studied atSt Antony's College, Oxford,[15] before becoming a correspondent forThe Economist and moving toWarsaw, Poland, in 1988.[16]
In November 1989, Applebaum drove from Warsaw to Berlin to report on the collapse of theBerlin Wall.[17]
As foreign correspondent forThe Economist andThe Independent, she covered thefall of the Berlin Wall and thefall of communism. In 1991 she returned to England to work forThe Economist; she was later hired as the foreign editor and subsequently deputy editor ofThe Spectator, and later the political editor of theEvening 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 ministerTony Blair.[20] She also undertook historical research for her bookGulag: 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, theLos Angeles Times book award, and theNational Book Critics Circle Award.[23]
| External videos | |
|---|---|
 Booknotes interview with Applebaum onGulag, May 25, 2003,C-SPAN | |
| Q&A interview with Applebaum onIron Curtain, December 16, 2012,C-SPAN |
Applebaum has been a member of the editorial board ofThe Washington Post,[5] and was a columnist for the newspaper for 17 years.[24] In addition, she was anadjunctfellow at theAmerican Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.[25]
Her second history book,Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944–56, was published in 2012 byDoubleday (in the US) andAllen Lane (in the UK); it was nominated for aNational Book Award and shortlisted for the 2013PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award.[26] From 2011 to 2016, she created and ran the Transitions Forum at theLegatum 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[29] projects on institutional change in those countries; and commissioned a series of papers on corruption in Georgia,[30] Moldova,[31] and Ukraine.[32]
WithForeign Policy magazine she created Democracy Lab, a website focusing on countries moving toward or away from democracy;[33] this later became Democracy Post[34] atThe Washington Post. In 2016, she left Legatum because of its stance on Brexit after theEuroskepticPhilippa Stroud was appointed CEO;[35] Applebaum then joined the London School of Economics (LSE) as a professor of practice at theInstitute for Global Affairs. At the LSE, she ran Arena, a program on disinformation and 21st-century propaganda.[36] In 2019, she moved the program to the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University.[8]
In 2017, she published her third history book,Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine, a history of theHolodomor (the 1932–33 human-made famine in Soviet Ukraine). The book won theLionel Gelber Prize[37] and theDuff Cooper Prize,[38] making her the only author to win the Duff Cooper Prize twice.[39]
In November 2019,The Atlantic announced that Applebaum would join the publication as a staff writer starting in January 2020.[24] She was included inProspect magazine's 2020 list of the top 50 thinkers for theCOVID-19 era.[40]
| External videos | |
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| Presentation by Applebaum onTwilight of Democracy, July 21, 2020,C-SPAN |
In July 2020, her bookTwilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism was published. Partly a memoir and partly political analysis, it was on the bestseller lists ofDer Spiegel magazine[41] andThe New York Times.[42] 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."[43]
In November 2022, Applebaum was one of 200 US citizens sanctioned by Russia for "promotion of the Russophobic campaign and support for the regime in Kiev."[44]
Applebaum is a member of theCouncil on Foreign Relations.[45] She is on the boards of theNational Endowment for Democracy andRenew Democracy Initiative.[46][47] She is also on the editorial boards ofThe American Interest magazine[48] and theJournal of Democracy.[49] She was a member of the international board of directors of theInstitute for War and Peace Reporting.[50] 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).[51]
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According toSheila Fitzpatrick, "Applebaum has been active as a political commentator highly critical of Russia and Putin's regime."[52]Ivan Krastev wrote that the 1989fall of the Berlin Wall "was the point of departure of everything that Applebaum did in the following three decades...For her, the end of theCold War was not a geopolitical story; it was a moral story, a verdict pronounced by history itself."[53]
In 2000, Applebaum described the links between the then-new president of Russia,Vladimir Putin; the former Soviet leaderYuri Andropov; and the formerKGB agency.[54] In 2008, she began speaking aboutPutinism as an anti-democratic ideology. However, most people at the time still considered Putin a pro-Western pragmatist.[55]
Applebaum has been a vocal critic of Western conduct toward theRussian military intervention in Ukraine. In aWashington 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", writing that Putin's actions had violated "a series of international treaties".[56] On March 7, in another article onThe Daily Telegraph, discussing aninformation war, Applebaum argued that "a robust campaign to tell the truth about Crimea is needed to counter Moscow's lies".[57] At the end of August, she asked whether Ukraine should prepare for "total war" with Russia and whether central Europeans should join them.[58] Critics of Applebaum's, including journalistGlenn Greenwald, have called her a "warmonger" and a "neocon".[59][60]
In 2014, she wrote a review ofKaren Dawisha's bookPutin's Kleptocracy forThe New York Review of Books; in it, 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".[61] She has described the "myth of Russian humiliation" and argued thatNATO andEU expansion have been a "phenomenal success".[62] In July 2016, before theUS election, she wrote about connections betweenDonald Trump and Russia;[63] she wrote that Russian support for Trump was part of a wider Russian political campaign designed to destabilize the West.[64] In December 2019, she wrote inThe Atlantic, "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."[65]
Applebaum's 2018 Washington Post article "This Is Why So Many Journalists Are At Risk Today" highlighted attacks on press freedom by "authoritarian and autocratic regimes".[66]
In "Kill the Messenger: Why Palestine radio and TV studios are fair targets in the Palestine/Israeli war", Applebaum justified the bombing of the official Palestinian media and said that it was "a combatant—and therefore a legitimate target—in a painful, never-ending, low-intensity war".[67] But in a 2024 interview, she denied that "radio stations or television stations are actually legitimate military targets".[68]
Applebaum has written about the history of central and eastern Europe, Poland in particular. In the conclusion to her bookIron Curtain, she argues 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 toVladimir Lenin.[69] She has written essays on the Polish filmmakerAndrzej Wajda;[70] the dual Nazi–Soviet occupation of central Europe;[71] and why it is inaccurate to defineEastern Europe as a single entity.[72]
Applebaum wrote about a 2014 Russian smear campaign against her while she was writing heavily about theRussian annexation of Crimea. She said that dubious online material was eventually recycled by semi-respectable American pro-Russia websites.[73] Applebaum argued in 2015 that Facebook should take responsibility for spreading false stories and help "undo the terrible damage done by Facebook and other forms of social media to democratic debate and civilized discussion all over the world".[74] Applebaum has been a member of the advisory panel for the organizationGlobal Disinformation Index.[75]
In March 2016, during the2016 US election campaign, Applebaum wrote a column forThe 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".[76] Applebaum endorsedHillary Clinton for president in July 2016, because Trump is "a man who appears bent on destroying the alliances that preserve international peace and American power".[77]
Applebaum wrote aWashington Post column in March 2016 that led the Swiss newspaperTages-Anzeiger and the German magazineDer Spiegel to interview her. These articles appeared in December 2016[78][79] and January 2017. She wrote that the international populist movement frequently called "far right" or "alt-right" is notconservative as this term has traditionally been defined. She wrote that populist groups in Europe share "ideas and ideology, friends and founders"; unlikeBurkean 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."[80] Applebaum has underlined the danger of a new "NationalistInternational", a union of xenophobic, nationalist parties such asLaw and Justice in Poland, theNorthern League in Italy, and theFreedom Party in Austria.[81]
In January 2022, Applebaum was invited to testify before theForeign Affairs Committee of theUS House of Representatives; the committee hearing was titled "Bolstering Democracy in the Age of Rising Authoritarianism".[82]
In 1992, Applebaum marriedRadosław Sikorski, who later served as Poland'sMinister of National Defence,Minister of Foreign Affairs,Marshal of the Sejm, and as a member of theEuropean Parliament. Sikorski is serving as Minister of Foreign Affairs inDonald Tusk's Third Cabinet. The couple has two sons.[83] Applebaum gainedPolish citizenship in 2013;[84] she speaks Polish and Russian in addition to English.[85]
In July 2025, Applebaum delivered the opening address at theSalzburg Festival.[86][87][88]
... is a summa cum laude graduate of Yale University, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.
As a celebration of our alumni, each month we will highlight a new book written by one of Oxford's North American-based alumni. For March 2018, our author is Anne Applebaum (St Antony's College, 1986).
1989 was the point of departure of everything that Applebaum did in the following three decades. Her much-praised history books about the Soviet Gulag and the establishment of the communist regimes in Central Europe were her historical introduction to the inevitability of 1989.
The [Russian] foreign ministry said the 200 US nationals included officials and legislators, their close relatives, heads of companies and experts "involved in the promotion of the Russophobic campaign and support for the regime in Kiev" ... [including] US writer and Russia expert Anne Applebaum
For scholars, the most interesting part of the book will be the two excellent historiographical chapters in which she teases out the political and scholarly impulses tending to minimise the famine in Soviet times ('The Cover-Up') and does the same for post-Soviet Ukrainian exploitation of the issue ('The Holodomor in History and Memory')
Applebaum's political identity was made by her admiration for the moral courage of East European dissidents and her belief in the potential of the United States to make the world a better place.
Radosław Sikorski is married to journalist and writer Anne Applebaum, who won the 2004 Pulitzer prize for her book "Gulag: A History". They have two sons: Aleksander and Tadeusz.
Anne Applebaum jest już pełnoprawną Polką.
In 1992, Applebaum won the Charles Douglas-Home Memorial Trust award for journalism in the ex-Soviet Union.
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