Anne Applebaum

Anne Applebaum
Born	Anne Elizabeth Applebaum[1] (1964-07-25) July 25, 1964[2] Washington, D.C.
Residence	Warsaw, Poland
Nationality	American, Polish
Education	B.A. 1986 (summa cum laude) MSc, 1987
Alma mater	Yale University London School of Economics St. Antony's College, Oxford
Occupation	Journalist Author
Known for	Writings on former Soviet Union and its satellite countries
Home town	Washington, D.C.
Spouse(s)	Radosław Sikorski (m. June 27, 1992)
Children	Aleksander, Tadeusz
Website	Anne Applebaum
Notes
[3]

Anne Elizabeth Applebaum (born July 25, 1964) is an American-born, naturalised Polish journalist and Pulitzer Prize–winning author who has written extensively about communism and the development of civil society in Central and Eastern Europe. She is the director of the Transitions Forum at the Legatum Institute in London. She has also been an editor at The Economist, and a member of the editorial board of The Washington Post (2002–2006).

Early life

Applebaum was born in Washington, D.C. Her parents are Harvey M. Applebaum, a partner in the Covington and Burling law firm, and Elizabeth (Bloom) Applebaum, of the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Applebaum has stated that she was brought up in a "very reformed" Jewish family.^[4] She graduated from the Sidwell Friends School (1982). She earned a BA (summa cum laude) at Yale University (1986), where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. As a Marshall Scholar at the London School of Economics she earned a master's degree in international relations (1987).^[5] She studied at St Antony's College, Oxford before moving to Warsaw, Poland, in 1988 as a correspondent for The Economist.^[6]

Career

Applebaum was an editor at The Spectator, and a columnist for both The Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph. She also wrote for The Independent. Working for The Economist, she provided coverage of important social and political transitions in Eastern Europe, both before and after the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In 1992, she was awarded the Charles Douglas-Home Memorial Trust Award.^[7]

Applebaum lived in London and Warsaw during the 1990s and was, for several years, a columnist for London's Evening Standard newspaper. She wrote about both foreign and domestic policy issues.

Applebaum's first book, Between East and West, is a travelogue, and was awarded an Adolph Bentinck Prize in 1996.^[8] Gulag: A History (2003), on the Soviet prison system, was awarded the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction writing.^[8][9][10] Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944–56, was published in 2012 by Doubleday in the USA and Allen Lane in the UK; it was shortlisted for the 2013 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award.^[11] Applebaum has also been a vocal critic of Communist regimes more broadly, commenting "Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Ceausescu, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Salvador Allende, Mengistu, Castro, Kim Il-sung: the list of murderous communist leaders is long, diverse and profoundly multicultural."^[12]

On May 24, 2006, she wrote that she was leaving Washington to live again in Poland.^[13]

Applebaum was a George Herbert Walker Bush/Axel Springer Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany, in 2006.^[14] Applebaum was also an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank.^[15]

In a blog post in September 2009, Applebaum called the arrest of film director Roman Polanski in Switzerland "outrageous" (Polanski was a fugitive from justice, having fled the United States some 36 years earlier after being convicted of sexually abusing a thirteen-year-old).^[16] Applebaum's stance was criticized by commentators Glenn Greenwald, Katha Pollitt, and Jillian York, who claimed that Applebaum had minimized Polanski's crimes and faulted her for not disclosing that her husband Radosław Sikorski, then the foreign minister of Poland, was appealing to U.S. authorities to seek Polanski's release.^[17][18][19] Applebaum responded in a second blog post that she had previously disclosed her husband's job, was not a spokesman for him, and "had no idea that the Polish government would or could lobby for Polanski's release."^[20]

In February 2008, she was awarded the Estonian Order of the Cross of Terra Mariana, third class.^[21] In 2010, she was given the Hungarian Petőfi Prize in Budapest's House of Terror Museum.^[22]

In the 2012–2013 academic year, she was the LSE IDEAS Philippe Roman Chair in History and International Affairs at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Since 2011, she is the director of the Transitions Forum at the Legatum Institute, an international think tank and educational charity based in London.

2014 Crimean crisis

On February 21, 2014, Applebaum wrote in the Daily Telegraph, documenting the breakdown in law and order in Ukraine over the previous fortnight. She concluded that it "is not a war, or even a conflict which either side can win with weapons. It will have to be solved through negotiations, elections, political debate; by civic organisations, political parties and political leaders, both charismatic and otherwise; with the participation of other European states and Ukraine's other neighbours."^[23]

Applebaum has been a vocal critic of Western conduct regarding the 2014 Crimean crisis. In an article in the Washington Post on March 5, 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 Putin had violated "a series of international treaties."^[24]

On March 7, in another article in the Telegraph discussing an information war, Applebaum argued that "a robust campaign to tell the truth about Crimea is needed to counter Moscow's lies."^[25] At the end of August she asked whether Ukraine should prepare for "total war" with Russia and whether central Europeans should join them.^[26]

Affiliations

Applebaum is a member of the Council on Foreign relations.^[27] and the Institute for War and Peace Reporting's International Board of Directors.^[28] She is a Senior Adjunct Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) where she co-leads a major initiative aimed at countering Russian disinformation in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE).^[29] She is on the editorial board for the American Interest ^[30] and the Journal of Democracy.^[31]

Personal life

Applebaum married former Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski in 1992. They have two sons: Alexander and Tadeusz.^[32] She became a Polish citizen in 2013.^[33] She is proficient in French, Polish^[34] and Russian.^[35]

Awards and honors

• 2004 Pulitzer Prize (General Non-Fiction), Gulag: A History^[36]
• 2010 Petőfi Prize
• 2012 National Book Award (Nonfiction), finalist, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944–1956^[37]
• 2013 Cundill Prize, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944–1956^[38]

Published works

• Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe, Pantheon Books,1994, ISBN 0-679-42150-5 and Random House, 1995, ISBN 0-517-15906-6
• Gulag: A History, Doubleday, 2003, 677 pages, ISBN 0-7679-0056-1; paperback, Bantam Dell, 2004, 736 pages, ISBN 1-4000-3409-4
• 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
• Gulag Voices : An Anthology, Yale University Press , 2011, 224 pages, ISBN 9780300177831; hardback
• From a Polish Country House Kitchen, Chronicle Books, 2012, 288 pages, ISBN 1-452-11055-7; hardback

References

Further reading

• Contemporary Review, December 2003, review of Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps, p. 379.
• History Today, October 2003, Helen Rappaport, review of Gulag, p. 58.
• Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 1994, review of Between East and West, p. 1095.
• The New York Times Book Review, December 18, 1994, Robert D. Kaplan, review of Between East and West, pp. 11–12.
• The Wall Street Journal, October 24, 1994, Brian Hill, review of Between East and West, p. A11.
• Washington Post Book World, November 20, 1994, Marie Arana-Ward, review of Between East and West, p. 4.

External links

• Official website
• 2005 Pulitzer Prize citation for Gulag: A History
• "Anne Applebaum, Opinion Writer" The Washington Post
• Appearances on C-SPAN
  • Booknotes interview with Applebaum on Gulag, May 25, 2003
• Putinism: the ideology on YouTube – 1:20 lecture by Anne Applebaum spoken in London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), recorded on Monday 28 January 2013.