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 General Nonfiction |
Website | www |
Anne Elizabeth Applebaum [2] [3] (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 , [4] and was a member of the editorial board of The Washington Post (2002–2006). [5] Applebaum won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction 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. 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 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. [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 Nonfiction. [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] making her the only author to ever win the Duff Cooper Prize 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 Kiev." [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? ]
According to Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Applebaum has been active as a political commentator highly critical of Russia and Putin’s regime." [52] 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." [53]
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. [54] 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. [55]
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". [56] 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". [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]
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". [59] She has described the "myth of Russian humiliation" and argued that NATO and EU expansion have been a "phenomenal success". [60] In July 2016, before the US election, she wrote about connections between Donald Trump and Russia [61] and wrote that Russian support for Trump was part of a wider Russian political campaign designed to destabilize the West. [62] 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." [63]
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. [64] She has written essays on the Polish film-maker Andrzej Wajda, [65] on the dual Nazi–Soviet occupation of central Europe, [66] and on why it is inaccurate to define "Eastern Europe" as a single entity. [67]
In 2014, Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev launched Beyond Propaganda, a program examining disinformation and propaganda, at the Legatum Institute. [68] 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. [69] 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". [70] Applebaum has been a member of the advisory panel of the Global Disinformation Index. [71]
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". [72] 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". [73]
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 [74] [75] 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." [76] 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. [77]
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". [78]
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 has again been Minister of Foreign Affairs. The couple have two sons, Aleksander and Tadeusz. [79] She became a Polish citizen in 2013. [80] She speaks Polish and Russian in addition to English. [81]
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.
This Pulitzer Prize has been awarded since 1942 for a distinguished example of reporting on international affairs, including United Nations correspondence. In its first six years (1942–1947), it was called the Pulitzer Prize for Telegraphic Reporting - International.
The Pulitzer Prizes for 2004 were announced on April 5, 2004.
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. Memorial is the recipient of numerous awards, among others the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022.
Victoria Jane Nuland is an American diplomat who served as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs from 2021 to 2024. A former member of the US Foreign Service, she served as Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs from 2013 to 2017 and the 18th U.S. ambassador to NATO from 2005 to 2008. Between July 2023 and February 2024, Nuland served as acting deputy secretary of state following the retirement of Wendy Sherman.
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 honors "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.
Tina Rosenberg is an American journalist and the author of three books. For one of them, The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism (1995), she won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the National Book Award for Nonfiction.
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.
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 nonfiction 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 Nonfiction and the 2004 Duff Cooper Prize. It was also nominated for the National Book Critics Circle prize and for the National Book Award.
Jo Becker is an American journalist and author and a four-time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize. She works as an investigative reporter for The New York Times.
Isabel Wilkerson is an African-American journalist and the author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (2010) and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020). She is the first woman of African-American heritage to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism.
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.
The StopFake website is a project of Ukrainian media NGO Media Reforms Center. It was founded in March 2014 by Ukrainian professors and students with the stated purpose of refuting Russian propaganda and fake news. It began as a Russian- and English-language fact-checking organization, and has grown to include a TV show broadcast on 30 local channels, a weekly radio show, and a strong social media following.
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 American-Polish historian 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).
Nina Jankowicz is an American researcher and writer. She is the author of How to Lose the Information War (2020), on Russian use of disinformation as geopolitical strategy, and How to Be a Woman Online (2022), a handbook for fighting against online harassment of women. She briefly served as executive director of the newly created United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS)'s Disinformation Governance Board, resigning from the position amid the dissolution of the board by DHS in May 2022.
Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World is a 2024 non-fiction book written by Pulitzer Prize winner Anne Applebaum and published by Doubleday. The book examines how Autocratic governments, which do not share a common ideology, collaborate to increase them power and control against the democratic and liberal countries. It is an expanded version of her article in The Atlantic magazine: "The Bad Guys Are Winning".
... 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 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 Tomasz.
Anne Applebaum jest już pełnoprawną Polką.