Anne Applebaum

Anne Elizabeth Applebaum (born July 25, 1964) is an American journalist and historian. She has written extensively about the history of Communism and the development of civil society in Central and Eastern Europe. Applebaum also holds Polish citizenship.

She has worked at The Economist and The Spectator, and was a member of the editorial board of The Washington Post (2002–2006). Applebaum won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 2004 for Gulag: A History published the previous year. She is a staff writer for The Atlantic and a senior fellow at The Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.

Early life and education
Applebaum was born in Washington, D.C., the eldest of three daughters of Harvey M. and Elizabeth Applebaum. Her father, a Yale alumnus, is senior counsel at Covington & Burling's Antitrust and International Trade Practices. Her mother was a program coordinator at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. According to Applebaum, her great-grandparents immigrated to America during the reign of Alexander III of Russia from what is now Belarus.

Applebaum has stated that she was brought up in a "very reform" Jewish family. After attending the Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C., Applebaum entered Yale University, where during the Fall 1982 semester she studied Soviet history under Wolfgang Leonhard. As an undergraduate, she spent the summer of 1985 in Leningrad, Soviet Union (now Saint Petersburg, Russia), an experience she credits with helping shape her opinions.

Applebaum received her BA from Yale in 1986 summa cum laude in history and literature, and 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). She also studied at St Antony's College, Oxford, before becoming a correspondent for The Economist and moving to Warsaw, Poland, in 1988.

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

Career
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 moved back to England to work for The Economist, and was later hired as the foreign and later deputy editor of The Spectator, and later the political editor of the Evening Standard.

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. In 2001, she interviewed prime minister Tony Blair. She also undertook historical research for her book Gulag: A History (2003) on the Soviet prison camp system, which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. It was also nominated for a National Book Award, for the Los Angeles Times book award and for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

She has been a member of The Washington Post editorial board. She was a columnist at The Washington Post for seventeen years. Applebaum was an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

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, shortlisted for the 2013 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award.

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, created the Future of Syria and Future of Iran projects on future institutional change in those two countries, and commissioned a series of papers on corruption in Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine.

Together with Foreign Policy magazine she created Democracy Lab, a website focusing on countries in transition to, or away from, democracy and which has since become Democracy Post at The Washington Post. She also ran Beyond Propaganda, 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 following the appointment of Euroskeptic Philippa Stroud as CEO and joined the London School of Economics 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. In the autumn of 2019 she moved the project to the Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University.

In October 2017, she published her third history book, Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine, a history of the Holodomor. The book won the Lionel Gelber Prize and the Duff Cooper Prize, making her the only author to ever win the Duff Cooper Prize twice.

In November 2019, The Atlantic announced that Applebaum was joining the publication as a staff writer starting in January 2020. She was included in the 2020 Prospect list of the top-50 thinkers for the COVID-19 era.

In July 2020, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism was published. Partly a memoir and partly political analysis, it was a Der Spiegel and New York Times bestseller.

Also in July 2020, Applebaum was one of the 153 signers of the "Harper's Letter" (also known as "A Letter on Justice and Open Debate") that expressed concern that "the free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted."

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 Kyiv."

Applebaum is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She is on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy and Renew Democracy Initiative. She was a member of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting's international board of directors. 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). She was on the editorial board for The American Interest and the Journal of Democracy.

Soviet Union and Russia
According to Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Applebaum has been active as a political commentator highly critical of Russia and Putin’s regime." Ivan Krastev asserts 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."

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, with the former Soviet leader Yuri Andropov and the former KGB. In 2008, she began speaking about "Putinism" as an anti-democratic ideology, though most at the time still considered the Russian president to be a pro-Western pragmatist.

Applebaum has been a vocal critic of Western conduct regarding 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". 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". At the end of August, she asked whether Ukraine should prepare for "total war" with Russia and whether central Europeans should join them.

In 2014, writing in The New York Review of Books she asked (in a review of Karen Dawisha's Putin's Kleptocracy) 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". She has described the "myth of Russian humiliation" and argued that NATO and EU expansion have been a "phenomenal success". In July 2016, before the US election, she wrote about connections between Donald Trump and Russia and wrote that Russian support for Trump was part of a wider Russian political campaign designed to destabilize the West. 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."

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. She has written essays on the Polish film-maker Andrzej Wajda, on the dual Nazi–Soviet occupation of central Europe, and on why it is inaccurate to define "Eastern Europe" as a single entity.

Disinformation, propaganda and fake news
In 2014, Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev launched Beyond Propaganda, a program examining disinformation and propaganda, at the Legatum Institute. Applebaum wrote about a 2014 Russian smear campaign aimed at her when 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. 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". Applebaum has been a member of the advisory panel of the Global Disinformation Index.

Nationalism
In March 2016, eight months before the election of President Donald Trump, Applebaum wrote a Washington Post column asking, "Is this the end of the West as we know it?", which 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". Applebaum endorsed Hillary Clinton's campaign for 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".

Applebaum's March 2016 Washington Post column prompted the Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger and the German magazine Der Spiegel to interview her. The articles appeared in December 2016 and January 2017. She argued very early on that the international populist movement which had frequently been identified as "far right" or "alt right" were in truth not conservative in nature in a way that the term "conservative" had long been defined. She wrote that populist groups in Europe share "ideas and ideology, friends and founders", and that, 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." 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.

In January 2022, Applebaum was invited to testify before the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee hearing entitled "Bolstering Democracy in the Age of Rising Authoritarianism".

Israel
In January 2002, Applebaum wrote a Slate opinion piece "Kill the Messenger" criticizing Israeli attacks on Palestinian Authority targets as ineffective and harmful, arguing instead for a focus on the Palestinian Authority's official media which she believes perpetuate anti-American sentiment and support for terrorism, thereby worsening the conflict.

Applebaum has critiqued Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's judicial overhaul and its impact on Israeli society. She argues that Netanyahu's efforts to change the judiciary have created deep divisions within Israel, which have implications for national security. This internal discord, she suggests, might have emboldened groups like Hamas to launch attacks, perceiving Israel as weakened by its internal strife

Personal life
In 1992, Applebaum married Radosław Sikorski, who later served as Poland's Defence Minister, Foreign Minister, Marshal of the Sejm, and a member of the European Parliament. Since 2023, he serves again as Minister of Foreign Affairs. The couple have two sons, Aleksander and Tadeusz. She became a Polish citizen in 2013. She speaks Polish and Russian in addition to English.

Awards and honors

 * 1992 Charles Douglas-Home Memorial Trust Award
 * 2003 National Book Award Nonfiction, finalist, Gulag: A History
 * 2003 Duff Cooper Prize for Gulag: A History
 * 2004 Pulitzer Prize (General Non-Fiction), Gulag: A History
 * 2008 Estonian Order of the Cross of Terra Mariana third class
 * 2008 Lithuanian Millenium Star
 * 2010 Petőfi Prize
 * 2012 Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland
 * 2012 National Book Award (Nonfiction), finalist, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944–1956
 * 2013 Cundill Prize in Historical Literature, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944–1956
 * 2013 Duke of Westminster's Medal for Military Literature, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944–1956
 * 2017 Doctor of Humane Letters Honoris Causa, Georgetown University
 * 2017 Honorary Doctorate, National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy
 * 2017 Duff Cooper Prize for her book Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine
 * 2017 Antonovych Prize
 * 2018 Lionel Gelber Prize for her book Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine
 * 2018 Honorary Fritz Stern Professor, University of Wrocław
 * 2019 Premio Nonino "Maestro del nostro tempo" ("Master of our Time")
 * 2019 Order of Princess Olga, third class
 * 2021 National Magazine Awards finalist in categories "Essays and Criticism" and "Columns and Commentary"
 * 2021 Premio Internacional de Periodismo de EL MUNDO
 * 2022 Order of Princess Olga, second class
 * 2024 Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels