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Anne Applebaum
Anne Applebaum
Anne Applebaum
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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.

Key Information

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 SNF Agora Institute and the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.[8]

Early life and education

[edit]

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 she says helped shape her opinions.[12]

Applebaum received her B.A. from Yale in 1986 in history and literature.[13][11] She received 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]

Career

[edit]

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]

External videos
video icon Booknotes interview with Applebaum on Gulag, May 25, 2003, C-SPAN
video icon Q&A interview with Applebaum on Iron Curtain, December 16, 2012, C-SPAN

Applebaum has been a member of the editorial board of The Washington Post,[5] and was a columnist for the newspaper for 17 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[29] projects 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 moving toward or away from democracy;[33] this later became Democracy Post[34] at The Washington Post. In 2016, she left Legatum because of its stance on Brexit after the Euroskeptic Philippa Stroud was appointed CEO;[35] 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.[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 the Holodomor (the 1932–33 human-made famine in Soviet Ukraine). The book won the Lionel Gelber Prize[37] and the Duff 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 in Prospect magazine's 2020 list of the top 50 thinkers for the COVID-19 era.[40]

External videos
video icon Presentation by Applebaum on Twilight of Democracy, July 21, 2020, C-SPAN

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[41] and The 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 the Council on Foreign Relations.[45] She is on the boards of the National Endowment for Democracy and Renew Democracy Initiative.[46][47] She is also on the editorial boards of The American Interest magazine[48] and the Journal of Democracy.[49] She was a member of the international board of directors of the Institute 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]

Positions

[edit]

Soviet Union and Russia

[edit]

According to Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Applebaum has been active as a political commentator highly critical of Russia and Putin's regime."[52] Ivan Krastev wrote 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]

In 2000, Applebaum described the links between the then-new president of Russia, Vladimir Putin; the former Soviet leader Yuri Andropov; and the former KGB agency.[54] In 2008, she began speaking about Putinism 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 the Russian military intervention in Ukraine. In a 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", writing that Putin's actions 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] Critics of Applebaum's, including journalist Glenn Greenwald, have called her a "warmonger" and a "neocon".[59][60]

In 2014, she wrote a review of Karen Dawisha's book Putin's Kleptocracy for The 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 that NATO and EU expansion have been a "phenomenal success".[62] In July 2016, before the US election, she wrote about connections between Donald 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 in The 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]

Press freedom

[edit]

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]

Central Europe

[edit]

Applebaum has written about the history of central and eastern Europe, Poland in particular. In the conclusion to her book Iron 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 to Vladimir Lenin.[69] She has written essays on the Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda;[70] the dual Nazi–Soviet occupation of central Europe;[71] and why it is inaccurate to define Eastern Europe as a single entity.[72]

Disinformation, propaganda and fake news

[edit]

Applebaum wrote about a 2014 Russian smear campaign against her while she was writing heavily about the Russian 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 organization Global Disinformation Index.[75]

Nationalism

[edit]

In March 2016, during the 2016 US election campaign, 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".[76] Applebaum endorsed Hillary 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 a Washington Post column 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[78][79] and January 2017. She wrote that the international populist movement frequently called "far right" or "alt-right" is not 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."[80] 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.[81]

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".[82]

Personal life

[edit]

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. Sikorski is serving as Minister of Foreign Affairs in Donald Tusk's Third Cabinet. The couple has two sons.[83] Applebaum gained Polish citizenship in 2013;[84] she speaks Polish and Russian in addition to English.[85]

In July 2025, Applebaum delivered the opening address at the Salzburg Festival.[86][87][88]

Awards and honors

[edit]

Selected publications

[edit]
  • 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)[109][52]
  • 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

References

[edit]
[edit]
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Anne Applebaum

View on Grokipedia
from Grokipedia
Anne Applebaum (born 1964) is an American historian, author, and journalist renowned for her scholarship on the history of , , and contemporary . Born in , she graduated summa cum laude from with a B.A. in history and literature in 1986, followed by a two-year at the London School of Economics and . Applebaum serves as a staff writer for The Atlantic, where she analyzes global political trends, and as a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute. Her seminal work : A History (2003), which provides a comprehensive archival examination of the Soviet forced-labor camp system, earned her the 2004 for General Nonfiction. Subsequent books, including (2012) on the imposition of in and (2020) critiquing the erosion of liberal norms in Western societies, have further established her as a leading voice on the mechanisms and ideological drivers of autocratic governance.

Early Life and Education

Family Background and Childhood

Anne Applebaum was born on July 25, 1964, in , to parents Harvey M. Applebaum and Elizabeth Applebaum. Her father was a longtime partner at the prominent Washington law firm , specializing in regulatory and antitrust matters. Her mother served as a program coordinator at the , contributing to cultural and educational initiatives in the city's arts scene. The family belonged to the Reform Jewish tradition and resided in the affluent , where Applebaum grew up as the eldest of three daughters in what has been characterized as a stable, upper-middle-class household connected to the Republican establishment through her father's legal networks. Her upbringing was described in contemporary accounts as painless and idyllic, reflecting the privileges of a professional family in the nation's capital during the mid-20th century. Applebaum attended , a Quaker-affiliated preparatory institution in , where she participated in activities such as the annual pageant, indicating an early exposure to diverse cultural and educational environments despite her family's Jewish heritage. This schooling laid foundational experiences in a rigorous academic setting known for educating children of political and professional elites.

Academic Training

Applebaum graduated from , a Quaker institution in , in 1982. She subsequently attended , earning a degree summa cum laude in history and literature in 1986. During her time at Yale, she focused on Russian history and literature. As a Marshall Scholar, Applebaum pursued postgraduate studies at the London School of Economics, where she received a degree in , and at University. This scholarship supported her transition toward expertise in international affairs and European history, aligning with her later journalistic focus on and post-communist transitions.

Professional Career

Early Journalism in Europe

Applebaum began her journalism career in 1988 upon relocating to Warsaw, Poland, where she served as the Warsaw correspondent for The Economist. In this role, she reported on the final years of communist governance in Poland amid growing opposition movements, including the resurgence of Solidarity and preparations for semi-free elections in June 1989. Her coverage captured the rapid unraveling of Soviet influence in the region, which few Western outlets prioritized due to the perceived unattractiveness of assignments in still-oppressive Eastern Bloc countries. Throughout 1989 and into 1990, Applebaum documented key events of the revolutions sweeping , including the fall of the on November 9, 1989, and the subsequent collapse of communist regimes in , , and beyond. Her reporting for and contributions to emphasized on-the-ground observations of political negotiations, public demonstrations, and economic strains under late communism, providing early analyses of the transitions toward and market reforms. These dispatches highlighted the challenges of reporting in environments with restricted access and state surveillance, yet they offered Western audiences firsthand accounts of the shift from authoritarian control. By 1991, Applebaum had expanded her freelance work across , traveling to borderlands and former Soviet territories to report on ethnic tensions and post-communist reconstruction for British publications. This period laid the foundation for her later historical writing, as her journalistic experiences informed detailed examinations of the region's societal fractures during the early .

Major Authorship and Historical Works

Applebaum's first major book, Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of , published in 1994, examines the cultural and historical complexities of the regions between and , drawing on her travels and to highlight ethnic diversity and historical tensions in areas often overlooked by mainstream European narratives. Her breakthrough historical work, Gulag: A History, released in 2003, chronicles the Soviet Union's system of forced-labor camps from their establishment under Lenin in the early 1920s through expansion under —where an estimated 18 million people passed through the camps and up to 2.75 million died—to gradual dismantlement after Stalin's death in 1953 and final closure under Gorbachev in the 1980s. The book relies on survivor testimonies, declassified documents, and economic analyses to detail camp operations, prisoner demographics—including political dissidents, kulaks, and ethnic minorities—and survival mechanisms, emphasizing the 's role in Soviet industrialization and terror. It received the 2004 . In : The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956, published in 2012, Applebaum documents the Soviet imposition of communist control across Poland, , and following , detailing mechanisms such as infiltration, forced collectivization, and suppression of that transformed diverse societies into uniform totalitarian states by the mid-1950s. The narrative contrasts initial post-liberation chaos with systematic Stalinist policies, including the elimination of , churches, and , supported by evidence from local archives and eyewitness accounts. Red Famine: Stalin's War on , issued in 2017, analyzes the 1932-1933 as a deliberate policy of starvation targeting Ukrainian peasants and nationalists, resulting in approximately 3.9 million deaths through grain requisitions, border closures, and punitive measures amid broader Soviet collectivization failures. Applebaum uses Ukrainian, Russian, and international archives to argue that the famine's severity in —exceeding that in other regions—stemmed from Stalin's intent to crush national resistance, refuting claims of mere mismanagement by highlighting exported grain surpluses and targeted deportations of over 390,000 people.

Think Tank, Academic, and Editorial Roles

Applebaum directed the Transitions Forum at the Legatum Institute, a London-based focused on and , from 2011 to 2015. During this period, she co-founded the institute's Democracy and Governance programme, which examined democratic transitions in post-authoritarian societies. In academic roles, Applebaum has been a senior fellow of international affairs at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) since 2019. She simultaneously holds a senior fellowship at the (SNF) Agora Institute at , where she joined in April 2019 to support research on and authoritarian challenges. In this capacity, she serves as an of the practice in international affairs and co-leads the Agora Research on Emergent Narratives and Attitudes () project, which investigates and modern . Applebaum transitioned to a staff writer position at The Atlantic in November 2019, contributing articles on U.S. politics, foreign policy, and European affairs. Previously, she wrote as a foreign affairs columnist for The Washington Post for over 15 years, ending around 2019, and served on its editorial board. Earlier in her career, she worked as foreign editor and deputy editor of The Spectator, a British weekly magazine.

Intellectual Positions

Analyses of Totalitarianism and Communism

Applebaum's seminal work Gulag: A History (2003) provides a detailed examination of the Soviet Union's forced-labor camp system, operational from 1918 through the 1980s, which she portrays as the regime's primary instrument of mass repression and social engineering under communism. Drawing on declassified archives opened after the Soviet collapse in 1991, as well as survivor testimonies and administrative records, she estimates that between 18 million and 25 million people passed through the camps, with peaks of up to 2.5 million inmates in the 1950s, and at least 1.6 million deaths from execution, disease, and overwork. Applebaum argues that the Gulag was not merely punitive but integral to Bolshevik ideology, serving economic goals like resource extraction in remote areas while enforcing ideological conformity through "re-education" labor, thereby atomizing society and eliminating potential opposition. She contrasts it with Nazi camps by noting the Gulag's longer duration and pseudo-rehabilitative rationale, yet underscores its totalitarian essence in dehumanizing inmates to sustain the communist state's absolute control. In : The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956 (2012), Applebaum extends her analysis to the Soviet imposition of across , , and following , depicting it as a deliberate totalitarian blueprint that dismantled pre-existing to impose a monolithic ideological order. She details how Soviet forces, leveraging occupation and local collaborators, first neutralized non-communist through arrests and rigged elections—such as Poland's fraudulent 1947 vote—then eradicated independent institutions like churches, youth groups, and private enterprises via and purges, resulting in the deaths or of tens of thousands. Applebaum contends that this process relied not only on overt terror, including show trials and operations that claimed over 100,000 lives in the region by 1956, but also on coerced enthusiasm and propaganda to foster a "new Soviet man," rendering alternatives to inconceivable. Her account refutes revisionist narratives minimizing Soviet agency, emphasizing instead the ideological drive to achieve total societal penetration. Applebaum's broader conceptualization of , informed by these histories, frames as a system that systematically obliterates intermediary institutions—families, voluntary associations, and markets—to centralize power and engineer from first principles of Marxist-Leninist doctrine. In essays and lectures, she describes this as "totalitarianism in practice," where enthusiasm for the regime becomes mandatory, dissent is preempted through and atomization, and substitutes coercion for market signals, leading to widespread inefficiency and , as seen in the collectivization drives of that killed millions. She warns that such regimes thrive by defining elites through loyalty rather than merit, a mechanism evident in the system, and critiques Western tendencies to euphemize Soviet atrocities as mere "deformations" rather than inherent to the ideology's rejection of pluralism. Applebaum's analyses, grounded in primary sources, highlight causal links between communist —positing class struggle as perpetual—and practical outcomes like the Gulag's role in suppressing kulaks during the 1930-1933 , which she estimates caused 5-7 million deaths.

Critiques of Russian and Post-Soviet Authoritarianism

Applebaum has portrayed the regime of Vladimir Putin as a kleptocracy in which authoritarian control is sustained through pervasive corruption, asset seizures, and the fusion of state power with oligarchic networks originating in the 1990s post-Soviet transition. In a 2014 New York Review of Books essay reviewing Karen Dawisha's Putin's Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia?, she outlined how Putin, upon assuming power in 1999–2000, leveraged his background in St. Petersburg's security apparatus to orchestrate the redistribution of privatized state enterprises, enabling a close circle of associates—often former KGB officers—to amass billions in wealth while dismantling independent media, judiciary, and political opposition. This process, she contended, marked a deliberate reversal of the brief democratic openings under Boris Yeltsin, reestablishing mafia-style governance where loyalty to the leader supplanted rule of law. She maintains that these kleptocratic foundations have endured, evolving into a more ideological imperialism without relinquishing extractive economics, as evidenced by the regime's response to following the 2014 annexation of and the 2022 invasion of , which relied on laundering illicit gains through global networks. In her 2024 book Autocracy, Inc.: Or, How Democracies Can Fight Back, Applebaum identifies as a vanguard of "autocracy inc.," a non-ideological model where dictators function like corporate executives, prioritizing elite enrichment and longevity over or doctrinal purity, with Russia's state-owned energy firms and sanctions-evasion schemes exemplifying this profit-driven authoritarianism. Applebaum critiques the Putin system's inherent fragility, attributing it to personalist rule that lacks predictable succession mechanisms, rendering Russia "one of the world's most unstable autocracies" amid elite infighting and from corruption-induced inefficiencies, such as the misallocation of over $1 trillion in oil revenues since 2000 toward patronage rather than diversification. She links this to broader post-Soviet pathologies, including historical denialism: in a essay, she argued that 's official narratives erase Soviet-era aggressions—like the 1939 and 1979 Afghanistan intervention—fostering a revanchist that justifies while suppressing domestic reckoning with the USSR's 20 million excess deaths under . Extending her analysis to post-Soviet authoritarianism beyond Russia, Applebaum has highlighted how kleptocratic tactics proliferated in states like Belarus under Alexander Lukashenko, where regime survival depends on similar resource plunder and alliances with , as seen in the 2020 election crackdown that imprisoned over 35,000 protesters and facilitated Russia's 2022 staging of forces for . In Autocracy, Inc., she describes these regimes as interconnected via shared tools—offshore finance, surveillance tech, and —forming a loose "kleptocracy club" that undermines Western sanctions by exploiting democratic openness, with Russia's export of models to allies exemplifying the diffusion of post-Soviet authoritarian resilience.

Perspectives on Disinformation and Propaganda

Anne Applebaum views and as central tools in the arsenal of modern autocracies, designed to undermine democratic institutions by fostering division, cynicism, and distrust without direct military confrontation. She argues that regimes such as and deploy coordinated campaigns across state media, outlets, and social platforms to amplify theories and erode faith in elections, media, and governance. For instance, following 's invasion of on February 24, 2022, Chinese state media disseminated false claims of U.S.-funded , which garnered millions of views and were echoed by domestic actors in target democracies, contributing to narratives that portray liberal systems as corrupt and conspiratorial. Applebaum emphasizes that platforms exacerbate these efforts by prioritizing emotional content—fear, anger, and outrage—over factual discourse, enabling rapid dissemination compared to pre-digital eras. Russian operations, in her analysis, exploit this by funding botnets, trolls, and tailored messaging to inflame existing societal fissures, such as racial tensions or debates, rather than promoting a singular as in Soviet . She cites the 2016 U.S. election interference, where leaked materials and fabricated stories like Pizzagate sowed chaos, with polls showing up to 30% belief in related conspiracies such as the Obama birther myth. This approach, she contends, succeeds by offering simplistic explanations for complex failures, attributing them to elite plots rather than systemic issues. In her book (2020), Applebaum extends this to the psychological appeal of , portraying it as a seductive force that attracts disillusioned intellectuals and elites toward through narratives providing moral certainty and scapegoats. She describes "clercs"—writers and thinkers—who propagate these views, drawing parallels to interwar where conspiracy-laden lured moderates by framing democratic pluralism as decadent. This internal propagation, combined with foreign influence, accelerates democratic decline, as seen in campaigns and European populist surges. To counter these threats, Applebaum advocates proactive measures short of , including "prebunking" via government entities like the U.S. Global Engagement Center (established around 2014–15 with a $61 million budget by 2024) to expose tactics early and build institutional resilience. She criticizes democracies for unilateral in the information domain, urging international collaboration to track cross-border operations from actors like and enhanced platform regulations to curb algorithmic amplification, while preserving open discourse.

Views on Nationalism, Populism, and Democratic Decline

Applebaum has articulated a distinction between defensive and exclusionary forms that she associates with authoritarian tendencies. In a 2014 analysis of Ukraine's , she argued that , when cultivated through and public events, serves as a vital bulwark against external aggression, particularly Russian imperialism, rather than an inherent threat. By contrast, in Western European contexts, she critiques nationalist movements for promoting and internal division, as exemplified by her 2018 commentary urging democrats not to cede to nationalists who redefine in narrow, xenophobic terms, drawing on French President Emmanuel Macron's vision of an outward-looking . In her 2020 book , Applebaum examines as a psychological and ideological driver of democratic erosion, focusing on how former liberal acquaintances in , , the , and the gravitated toward right-wing populist leaders like , , and . She posits that appeals to those disillusioned with liberal institutions, offering a of and national revival, often mirroring interwar clerical-fascist ideologies that prioritized and tradition over pluralism. Applebaum attributes this shift partly to social media's role in amplifying and , though she emphasizes personal motivations like resentment and the desire for recognition over purely structural economic factors. Applebaum links populist governance to tangible democratic decline through institutional capture and . In under Orbán since 2010, she highlights how populist rule has entrenched poverty and graft, undermining rule-of-law norms and . Similarly, in Poland's (PiS) administration from 2015 to 2023, she critiques policies eroding and media freedom as steps toward "illiberal ," though she notes the 2023 electoral defeat of PiS by a centrist coalition as evidence that populism can be countered through civic mobilization and appeals to patriotic values like and . Extending this to the , Applebaum warns that Trump's 2016–2021 presidency exemplified populist tactics that normalized and loyalty tests, fostering a "decline of reality-based " akin to autocratic networks. To combat where empirical facts fail to persuade, Applebaum advocates pragmatic strategies including alternative messaging via trusted local voices, humor to deflate authoritarian narratives, and reclaiming patriotism from nationalists. She rejects inevitability in democratic backsliding, citing Poland's 2023 turnaround and the UK's 2024 Labour victory over populist challengers as proofs that organized resistance can restore liberal democratic norms. In her 2024 book Autocracy, Inc., Applebaum further frames populist regimes as nodes in a global autocratic ecosystem that launders illicit funds and exports kleptocratic practices, urging democracies to sever these ties to halt decline.

Evaluations and Challenges to Her Theses

Applebaum's theses on the seductive appeal of among disillusioned s and intellectuals have been evaluated as perceptive in highlighting the role of personal networks in propagating illiberal ideas, drawing on her observations of former acquaintances' shifts toward movements. However, critics contend that her emphasis on psychological factors—such as , thinking, and a desire for simple narratives—overlooks structural and policy-driven causes of support, including , , and -driven that eroded community ties and wages for working-class voters. For instance, analyses of voting patterns indicate that supporters prioritized control and national sovereignty over nostalgic , contradicting Applebaum's framing of as primarily a reactionary betrayal rather than a response to unmet material needs like stagnant since the and job losses to low-wage migration. Challenges to her predictions of democratic twilight often center on empirical evidence of institutional durability under populist governance. In Poland, Applebaum warned of creeping autocracy under the Law and Justice (PiS) party, yet the 2023 parliamentary election saw PiS lose its absolute majority, enabling a pro-European coalition to form without systemic breakdown, suggesting electoral mechanisms and civil society retained efficacy despite media and judicial reforms. Similarly, Hungary's Fidesz under Viktor Orbán has maintained power through repeated elections, but opposition parties continue to compete, and urban areas show persistent liberal strongholds, as evidenced by the narrow 51-49% presidential win for incumbent Andrzej Duda in 2020—indicating no wholesale rejection of democratic norms by the populace. Critics argue this resilience undermines her narrative of inevitable decline, portraying it instead as "liberal catastrophism" that exaggerates threats while downplaying pre-populist elite errors, such as unchecked immigration and supranational policies like the euro, which alienated voters without addressing their grievances. Her critiques of populism as inherently authoritarian have drawn fire for a perceived defense of neoliberal , which some evaluate as disconnected from the dignity crises it exacerbated. Applebaum's dismissal of economic deprivation—placing terms like "poor" in scare quotes and asserting basic needs are met via modern amenities—ignores data on zero-cash-income households (around 9 million in the U.S.) and the hollowing out of industries, factors causal analysts link more directly to populist surges than elite "clercs'" intellectual lapses. Left-leaning evaluations fault her for superficially equating with a marginal "authoritarian left" while absolving center-right policies, like Poland's era under her husband , of widening inequality that preconditioned PiS's appeal. This selective focus, detractors claim, reflects an unexamined faith in meritocratic , failing to grapple with how its failures—financial crashes, endless wars, and cultural disconnects—legitimately fueled demands for alternatives, rather than mere authoritarian temptation.

Personal Life

Marriage and Family

Anne Applebaum married , a Polish and , on June 27, 1992, in . The couple met while Applebaum was working as a in and Sikorski was involved in anti-communist activities. Applebaum and Sikorski have two sons, and Tadeusz. The family has resided primarily in , including a manor house in Chobielin near , alongside time spent in Washington, D.C.

Residences and Dual Citizenship

Applebaum divides her time between residences in Washington, D.C., and Poland. Her family owns a manor house in Chobielin, a village in northwest Poland, which her husband and his parents purchased around 2008. She first moved to Warsaw in 1988 as a junior journalist covering the region's political transitions. Born in , on July 25, 1964, Applebaum holds U.S. citizenship by birth. She acquired Polish citizenship in 2013, granting her dual nationality alongside her American status. This dual citizenship aligns with her marriage to Polish Foreign Minister and her extensive professional focus on Central and Eastern European affairs.

Awards and Publications

Major Awards and Honors

Applebaum received the for General in 2004 for her book : A History, which detailed the Soviet forced-labor camp system based on archival research and survivor accounts. She also won the in the same year for the same work, recognizing its contribution to non-fiction . In 2013, she was awarded the Cundill Prize in Historical Literature, valued at C$75,000, for : The Crushing of , 1944-1956, which examined the imposition of communist regimes in post-World War II . For Red Famine: Stalin's War on (2017), Applebaum secured the Lionel Gelber Prize, honoring outstanding writing on , as well as a second , making her the only author to win it twice. More recently, in 2024, she received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, one of Europe's most prestigious literary honors, for her analyses of and threats to . That year, she also earned the Medal for her commitment to and .

Selected Books and Writings

Anne Applebaum's major books focus on the history of , authoritarian regimes, and threats to , drawing on archival research and firsthand observation in . Her works include historical analyses of Soviet repression and examinations of modern kleptocratic networks.
  • Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of (1994): This travelogue recounts Applebaum's 1991 journey from the Baltic to the , exploring ethnic tensions, national identities, and the remnants of Soviet influence in , , and other border regions amid the USSR's collapse.
  • Gulag: A History (2003): A comprehensive account of the Soviet forced-labor camp system from the through its decline, based on survivor testimonies, declassified documents, and camp records, detailing operations, prisoner demographics, and ideological justifications; it received the 2004 .
  • Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956 (2012): Examines the Soviet imposition of communist control in Poland, , , and post-World War II, including mechanisms, cultural , and resistance efforts.
  • Red Famine: Stalin's War on (2017): Argues that the 1932–1933 Ukrainian famine () resulted from deliberate Soviet policies of collectivization, grain requisitions, and national suppression, estimating 5 million deaths based on demographic data and party archives.
  • Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism (2020): Analyzes the appeal of populist and authoritarian movements in and the , using personal networks and case studies from , , , and Britain to explain ideological shifts among intellectuals and elites.
  • Autocracy, Inc. (2024): Describes a global network of kleptocratic autocrats— including leaders in , , , and —who sustain power through , , and sanctions evasion rather than ideological unity, proposing democratic countermeasures like transparency and alliances.
Applebaum has also edited Gulag: A Documentary History (2005), compiling primary sources on the camps, and co-authored cookbooks such as From a Polish Country House Kitchen (2012) with her husband, . Her nonfiction writings extend to essays and columns for outlets including The Atlantic, where she serves as a since 2020, often critiquing , democratic erosion, and ; notable pieces include analyses of Russian influence operations and European .

Controversies and Criticisms

Accusations of Ideological Bias

Critics from the political right have accused Applebaum of exhibiting an elitist bias against populist movements, portraying them as inherently illiberal or authoritarian without sufficient nuance for underlying grievances such as economic dislocation or cultural alienation. In her 2020 book Twilight of Democracy, Applebaum describes former conservative acquaintances who supported Brexit or Donald Trump as having succumbed to authoritarian temptations, a framing reviewers contend dismisses legitimate democratic expressions as delusions orchestrated by misleading elites. This perspective, critics argue, reflects a center-right establishment bias that immunizes educated cosmopolitans against populist appeals while pathologizing dissent as psychological defect or conspiracy-mongering. From the left, Applebaum has been labeled an unreformed neoconservative, with detractors pointing to her advocacy for robust Western interventions against autocracies as evidence of hawkish ideological rigidity unchastened by post-9/11 failures in and . Her emphasis on anti-communist histories, such as Gulag: A History (2003) and Red Famine (2017), draws charges of selective framing that equates Soviet and Nazi regimes to bolster a Cold War-era moral binary favoring over restraintist policies. Reviewers in outlets like Jacobin contend this underpins her rifts with contemporary conservatives, whom she critiques for illiberal turns, while overlooking how her own priors align with interventionist that prioritizes via sanctions and alliances deemed inadequate only in their timidity. Applebaum's broader writings on and democratic decline have elicited accusations of , where she attributes populist successes to elite hypocrisy or foreign meddling rather than endogenous failures of neoliberal , such as stagnation or institutional . For instance, her 2019 Washington Post column linking figures like Trump, Viktor Orbán, and Marine Le Pen through shared hypocrisy rather than shared policy critiques has been faulted for moralistic overreach that evades empirical analysis of voter priorities like immigration control or sovereignty restoration. These claims, often from non-mainstream or ideologically opposed sources, highlight tensions between Applebaum's commitment to empirical histories of and perceptions of her analyses as serving a defense of status-quo against electoral upheavals.

Debates Over Policy Influence and Predictions

Applebaum's predictions of democratic erosion, particularly in her 2020 book , posited that disillusioned intellectuals and cultural elites would enable authoritarian-leaning , leading to institutional decay in Western democracies including Poland, , and the . Critics, however, contend that her framework conflates legitimate nationalist reforms addressing migration, economic inequality, and elite detachment with inevitable , overstating the appeal of while underemphasizing democratic resilience, as evidenced by the persistence of elections and judicial checks post-2016 in the U.S. and Europe. Debates intensify over the accuracy of her forecasts amid events like the January 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot and the 2024 reelection of , which she linked to a broader "autocratic alliance" eroding the post-World War II order; proponents credit her with prescient warnings of transnational autocrat networks, while detractors argue such events reflect transient polarization rather than systemic twilight, noting no full democratic collapse by 2025 and populists' electoral losses in places like France's 2024 legislative elections. On policy influence, Applebaum has advocated for aggressive measures against Russian expansionism, including sustained arming of since the 2022 and seizure of frozen Russian assets estimated at over $300 billion for reconstruction, influencing discussions in Atlanticist circles and aligning with NATO's 2023 Vilnius Summit commitments to Kyiv's defense. Yet, skeptics question the efficacy of these hawkish prescriptions, attributing prolonged conflict—over 800,000 combined casualties by mid-2025—to an overreliance on military escalation over negotiation, and criticize her neoconservative lens for echoing past interventionist failures in and without accounting for domestic war fatigue in donor nations like the U.S., where aid packages faced congressional delays in 2024. Her proximity to Polish Foreign Minister , her husband since 1992 and a key architect of Poland's pro-Ukraine stance post-2022, fuels debate on indirect sway over policy, including Warsaw's push for Taurus missile transfers; while Applebaum denies operational involvement, observers note synergies between her Atlantic columns and Sikorski's , raising concerns about blurred lines between journalism and policymaking in Eastern European security debates.

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