Anne Applebaum | |
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Born | Anne Elizabeth Applebaum July 25, 1964 [1] Washington, D.C., U.S. |
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Education | |
Known for | Writing on Soviet Union and its satellite countries |
Spouse | |
Children | 2 |
Awards | Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction |
Website | www |
Anne Elizabeth Applebaum [2] [3] (born July 25, 1964) is an American-Polish journalist and historian. She has written extensively about the history of Communism and the development of civil society in Central and Eastern Europe.
She has worked at The Economist and The Spectator , [4] and was a member of the editorial board of The Washington Post (2002–2006). [5] Applebaum won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 2004 for Gulag: A History published the previous year. [6] She is a staff writer for The Atlantic [7] and a senior fellow at The Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. [8]
Applebaum was born in Washington, D.C., [2] 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 is 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. [9]
Applebaum has stated that she was brought up in a "very reform" Jewish family. [10] 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. [11] 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. [12]
Applebaum received her BA from Yale in 1986 summa cum laude in history and literature, [13] [11] 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). [14] She also studied at St Antony's College, Oxford, before becoming a correspondent for The Economist and moving to Warsaw, Poland, in 1988. [15]
In November 1989, Applebaum drove from Warsaw to Berlin to report on the collapse of the Berlin Wall. [16]
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 . [17]
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. [18] In 2001, she interviewed prime minister Tony Blair. [19] 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. [6] [20] [21] It was also nominated for a National Book Award, for the Los Angeles Times book award and for the National Book Critics Circle Award. [22]
External videos | |
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Booknotes interview with Applebaum on Gulag, May 25, 2003, C-SPAN | |
Q&A interview with Applebaum on Iron Curtain, December 16, 2012, C-SPAN |
She has been a member of The Washington Post editorial board. [5] She was a columnist at The Washington Post for seventeen years. [23] Applebaum was an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. [24]
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. [25]
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, [26] created the Future of Syria [27] and Future of Iran projects [28] on future institutional change in those two countries, and commissioned a series of papers on corruption in Georgia, [29] Moldova [30] and Ukraine. [31]
Together with Foreign Policy magazine she created Democracy Lab, a website focusing on countries in transition to, or away from, democracy [32] and which has since become Democracy Post [33] at The Washington Post. She also ran Beyond Propaganda, [34] 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 [35] 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. [36] In the autumn of 2019 she moved the project 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 book won the Lionel Gelber Prize [37] and the Duff Cooper Prize [38] for the second time, making her the only author to ever win the award twice. [39]
In November 2019, The Atlantic announced that Applebaum was joining the publication as a staff writer starting in January 2020. [23] She was included in the 2020 Prospect list of the top-50 thinkers for the COVID-19 era. [40]
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Presentation by Applebaum on Twilight of Democracy, July 21, 2020, C-SPAN |
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 [41] and New York Times bestseller. [42]
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." [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 Kyiv." [44]
Applebaum is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. [45] She is on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy and Renew Democracy Initiative. [46] [47] She was a member of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting's international board of directors. [48] 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). [49] She was on the editorial board for The American Interest [50] and the Journal of Democracy . [51] [ when? ]
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. [52] She became a Polish citizen in 2013. [53] She speaks Polish and Russian in addition to English. [54]
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was a Russian writer and prominent Soviet dissident who helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union, especially the Gulag prison system.
The Gulag was a system of forced labor camps in the Soviet Union. The word Gulag originally referred only to the division of the Soviet secret police that was in charge of running the forced labor camps from the 1930s to the early 1950s during Joseph Stalin's rule, but in English literature the term is popularly used for the system of forced labor throughout the Soviet era. The abbreviation GULAG (ГУЛАГ) stands for "Гла́вное Управле́ние исправи́тельно-трудовы́х ЛАГере́й", but the full official name of the agency changed several times.
Memorial is an international human rights organisation, founded in Russia during the fall of the Soviet Union to study and examine the human rights violations and other crimes committed under Joseph Stalin's reign. Subsequently, it expanded the scope of its research to cover the entire Soviet period.
Walter Duranty was an Anglo-American journalist who served as Moscow bureau chief of The New York Times for fourteen years (1922–1936) following the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War (1917–1923).
Radosław Tomasz "Radek" Sikorski is a Polish politician, journalist and statesman who has served as Minister of Foreign Affairs of Poland in Donald Tusk's cabinet since 2023, previously holding the office between 2007 and 2014. He was a Member of the European Parliament between 2019 and 2023. Earlier he was Marshal of the Sejm from 2014 to 2015. He previously served as Deputy Minister of National Defence (1992) in Jan Olszewski's cabinet, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs (1998–2001) in Jerzy Buzek's cabinet and Minister of National Defence (2005–2007) in the cabinets of Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz and Jarosław Kaczyński.
Steve Coll is an American journalist, academic, and executive.
Dana Louise Priest is an American journalist, writer and teacher. She has worked for nearly 30 years for the Washington Post and became the third John S. and James L. Knight Chair in Public Affairs Journalism at the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism in 2014. Before becoming a full-time investigative reporter at the Post, Priest specialized in intelligence reporting and wrote many articles on the U.S. "War on terror" and was the newspaper's Pentagon correspondent. In 2006 she won the Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting citing "her persistent, painstaking reports on secret "black site" prisons and other controversial features of the government's counter-terrorism campaign." The Washington Post won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, citing the work of reporters Priest and Anne Hull and photographer Michel du Cille "exposing mistreatment of wounded veterans at Walter Reed Hospital, evoking a national outcry and producing reforms by federal officials."
Timothy David Snyder is an American historian specializing in the history of Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust. He is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.
The Lionel Gelber Prize is a literary award for English non-fiction books on foreign policy. Founded in 1989 by Canadian diplomat Lionel Gelber, the prize awards "the world’s best non-fiction book in English on foreign affairs that seeks to deepen public debate on significant international issues." A prize of CA$50,000 is awarded to the winner. The award is presented annually by the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto.
Infidel is a 2006 autobiography of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-Dutch activist and politician. Hirsi Ali has attracted controversy and death threats were made against Ali in the early 2000s over the publication of the book.
The Soviet famine of 1930–1933 was a famine in the major grain-producing areas of the Soviet Union, including Ukraine and different parts of Russia, including Kazakhstan, Northern Caucasus, Kuban Region, Volga Region, the South Urals, and West Siberia. Major causes include: the forced collectivization of agriculture as a part of the First Five-Year Plan and forced grain procurement from farmers. These factors in conjunction with a massive investment in heavy industry decreased the agricultural workforce. Estimates conclude that 5.7 to 8.7 million people died of hunger across the Soviet Union.
Holodomor denial is the claim that the Holodomor, a 1932–33 man-made famine that killed millions in Soviet Ukraine, did not occur or diminishing its scale and significance.
Gulag: A History, also published as Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps, is a non-fiction book covering the history of the Soviet Gulag system. It was written by American author Anne Applebaum and published in 2003 by Doubleday. Gulag won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and the 2004 Duff Cooper Prize. It was also nominated for the National Book Critics Circle prize and for the National Book Award.
Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin is a 2010 book by Yale historian Timothy Snyder. It is about mass murders committed before and during World War II in territories controlled by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
The Kazakh famine of 1930–1933, also known as the Asharshylyk, was a famine during which approximately 1.5 million people died in the Kazakh Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic, then part of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic in the Soviet Union, of whom 1.3 million were ethnic Kazakhs. An estimated 38 to 42 percent of all Kazakhs died, the highest percentage of any ethnic group killed by the Soviet famine of 1930–1933. Other research estimates that as many as 2.3 million died. A committee created by the Kazakhstan parliament chaired by Historian Manash Kozybayev concluded that the famine was "a manifestation of the politics of genocide", with 1.75 million victims.
Estimates of the number of deaths attributable to the Soviet revolutionary and dictator Joseph Stalin vary widely. The scholarly consensus affirms that archival materials declassified in 1991 contain irrefutable data far superior to sources used prior to 1991, such as statements from emigres and other informants.
The Renew Democracy Initiative (RDI) is a non-partisan organization committed to identifying and combating threats to freedom in the U.S. and around the world. Although based on a moderate political perspective, its leadership consists of individuals from a variety of ideological backgrounds and it has published content spanning the political spectrum. It was founded in 2017 by former World Chess Champion and Russian dissident Garry Kasparov, and its board is made up of people ranging from center-left to center-right including Senators Heidi Heitkamp and Bob Kerrey, Pulitzer Prize-winners Bret Stephens and Anne Applebaum, Congressman Mickey Edwards, former RNC Chairman Michael Steele, and former World Poker Champion Annie Duke, among others.
Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine is a 2017 non-fiction book by Anne Applebaum, focusing on the history of the Holodomor. The book won the Lionel Gelber Prize and the Duff Cooper Prize.
Nataliya Petrivna Gumenyuk is a Ukrainian journalist and author specializing in foreign affairs and conflict reporting. She is a co-founder and CEO of the Public Interest Journalism Lab, and a co-founder of the independent media Hromadske. She is the author of several books, including The Lost Island: Tales from the Occupied Crimea (2020).
... is a summa cum laude graduate of Yale University, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.
On Nov. 10, 1989, Applebaum, then a young reporter, jumped in a car in the company of her soon-to-be husband—future Polish Foreign and Defense Minister Radek Sikorski—and drove from Warsaw to Berlin to see with her own eyes the collapse of the Berlin Wall. 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 Kyiv" ... [including] US writer and Russia expert Anne Applebaum
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 Tomasz.
Anne Applebaum jest już pełnoprawną Polką.
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')