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 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, 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]
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.[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 projects[29] on future institutional change in those two 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 in transition to or away from democracy[33] and which has since become Democracy Post[34] at The Washington Post. She also ran Beyond Propaganda,[35] 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 EuroskepticPhilippa Stroud as CEO[36] 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.[37] In the autumn of 2019 she moved the project to the Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University.[8]
In November 2019, The Atlantic announced that Applebaum was joining the publication as a staff writer starting in January 2020.[24] She was included in the 2020 Prospect list of the top-50 thinkers for the COVID-19 era.[41]
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."[45]
According to Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Applebaum has been active as a political commentator highly critical of Russia and Putin’s regime."[53]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."[54]
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.[55] 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.[56]
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".[57] 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".[58] At the end of August, she asked whether Ukraine should prepare for "total war" with Russia and whether central Europeans should join them.[59] Critics of Applebaum's, including journalist Glenn Greenwald, have called Applebaum a "warmonger" and a "neocon".[60][61]
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".[62] She has described the "myth of Russian humiliation" and argued that NATO and EU expansion have been a "phenomenal success".[63] In July 2016, before the US election, she wrote about connections between Donald Trump and Russia[64] and wrote that Russian support for Trump was part of a wider Russian political campaign designed to destabilize the West.[65] 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."[66]
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.[67] She has written essays on the Polish film-maker Andrzej Wajda,[68] on the dual Nazi–Soviet occupation of central Europe,[69] and on why it is inaccurate to define "Eastern Europe" as a single entity.[70]
Disinformation, propaganda and fake news
In 2014, Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev launched Beyond Propaganda, a program examining disinformation and propaganda, at the Legatum Institute.[71] 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.[72] 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".[73] Applebaum has been a member of the advisory panel of the Global Disinformation Index.[74]
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".[75] 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".[76]
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[77][78] 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."[79] 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.[80]
Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe, Pantheon, (1994), reprinted by Random House, 1995; Penguin, 2015; and Anchor, 2017, ISBN0679421505
^"Anne Applebaum". University of Oxford. Retrieved April 2, 2025. As a celebration of our alumni, each month we will highlight a new book written by one of Oxford's North American-based alumni. For March 2018, our author is Anne Applebaum (St Antony's College, 1986).
^Ivan Krastev (August 15, 2020). "The Tragic Romance of the Nostalgic Western Liberal". Foreign Policy. Retrieved November 15, 2022. 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.
^"Anne Applebaum". The Nine Dots Prize. Retrieved September 1, 2022.
^"Russia Bans Entry To Biden's Siblings, US Senators". Agence France Press. Barrons. November 11, 2022. Retrieved November 13, 2022. 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
^ abFitzpatrick, Sheila (August 25, 2017). "Red Famine by Anne Applebaum review – did Stalin deliberately let Ukraine starve?". The Guardian. Retrieved August 25, 2017. 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')
^Ivan Krastev (August 15, 2020). "The Tragic Romance of the Nostalgic Western Liberal". Foreign Policy. Retrieved May 30, 2024. 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.
^Anne, Applebaum (April 10, 2000). "Secret Agent Man". Weekly Standard. Archived from the original on August 29, 2017. Retrieved April 3, 2017.
^"Minister of Foreign Affairs Radosław Sikorski". Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland. April 23, 2008. Archived from the original on April 11, 2008. Retrieved April 23, 2008. 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 Tadeusz.
Putinism: the ideology on YouTube – 1:20 lecture by Anne Applebaum spoken in London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), recorded on Monday, January 28, 2013.
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