1964–
A historian of Soviet and Eastern European memory
De-Stalinization after the Twentieth Congress took “two steps forward, then one step back.”
Anne Applebaum is an American historian and journalist whose work examines communism, authoritarianism, and civil society in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Gulag: A History reconstructed the camp system from the Revolution to its collapse through archival research and testimony, winning the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. In Iron Curtain and Red Famine, she explored the Sovietization of postwar Eastern Europe and the Ukrainian famine, arguing that the Twentieth Congress made de-Stalinization a movement of both release and renewed control.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1986B.A. in history and literature, Yale University
- 1987M.Sc. in international relations, London School of Economics
- 1988–1991Warsaw correspondent and Eastern Europe reporter, The Economist
- 1992–1996Foreign editor and deputy editor, The Spectator, later political editor, Evening Standard
- 2002–2006Editorial board member, The Washington Post
- 2003–2004Published Gulag: A History and won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction
- 2011–2016Founded and directed the Transitions Forum at the Legatum Institute
- 2020–현재Staff writer at The Atlantic and senior fellow at Johns Hopkins University's SNF Agora Institute
Related historical events
- 1932–1933The Holodomor and the Collectivisation FamineHistorian of the Ukrainian famineShe explored the Ukrainian famine in Red Famine.
- 1944–1949The People's Democracies of Eastern EuropeAuthor of Iron CurtainComparing East Germany, Poland and Hungary, she set out how control of the security services, youth organisations and broadcasting preceded the elections.
- 1956.02The Twentieth Party Congress and the Secret Speechhistorian who analyzed the secret speechShe characterized post-secret-speech de-Stalinization as 'two steps forward, then one step back.'
- 1989The Revolutions of 1989Journalist who covered the 1989 revolutionsShe covered the 1989 revolutions and recounted the experience in a 1994 book.
Democratization and civil society: the Leninist roots of repression
Applebaum's coverage of the 1989 revolutions became her 1994 book Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe, a travelogue describing the rise of nationalism across the new states of the former Soviet Union. Her focus then shifted to how societies rebuild democracy after communism. From 2011 to 2016 she created and ran the Transitions Forum at the Legatum Institute in London, running a two-year program on democracy and growth in Brazil, India, and South Africa, creating the Future of Syria and Future of Iran projects, and commissioning papers on corruption in Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine. Democracy Lab, which she created with Foreign Policy magazine to track countries moving toward or away from democracy, later became Democracy Post at The Washington Post. In 2016 she left Legatum over its stance on Brexit and moved to the London School of Economics, where she ran Arena, a program on disinformation and twenty-first-century propaganda, which she moved to Johns Hopkins University's SNF Agora Institute in 2019. The theoretical core of this work appeared in a 2015 Journal of Democracy essay. She argues that the early Bolsheviks developed an alternative theory of civil society: where Burke, Tocqueville, and even Russian intellectuals treated civil society as fundamental to democracy, Lenin held that its destruction was crucial to totalitarian dictatorship. In her account, regimes influenced by Soviet ideology, in Belarus, Central Asia, China, Cuba, and elsewhere, still treat independent civic institutions as a threat to the state.