Anne Applebaum

Applebaum was born in Washington, D.C., the eldest of three daughters of Harvey M. and Elizabeth Applebaum. Her father, a Yale alumnus, is senior counsel at Covington & Burling's Antitrust and International Trade Practices. Her mother is 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.

Applebaum has stated that she was brought up in a "very reform" Jewish family. 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. 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.

Applebaum received her BA from Yale in 1986 summa cum laude in history and literature, 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). She also studied at St Antony's College, Oxford, before becoming a correspondent for The Economist and moving to Warsaw, Poland, in 1988.

In November 1989, Applebaum drove from Warsaw to Berlin to report on the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

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.

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. In 2001, she interviewed prime minister Tony Blair. 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 Non-Fiction. It was also nominated for a National Book Award, for the Los Angeles Times book award and for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

She has been a member of The Washington Post editorial board. She was a columnist at The Washington Post for seventeen years. Applebaum was an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

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.

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, created the Future of Syria and Future of Iran projects on future institutional change in those two countries, and commissioned a series of papers on corruption in Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine.

Together with Foreign Policy magazine she created Democracy Lab, a website focusing on countries in transition to, or away from, democracy and which has since become Democracy Post at The Washington Post. She also ran Beyond Propaganda, 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 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. In the autumn of 2019 she moved the project to the Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University.

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 and the Duff Cooper Prize for the second time, making her the only author to ever win the award twice.

In November 2019, The Atlantic announced that Applebaum was joining the publication as a staff writer starting in January 2020. She was included in the 2020 Prospect list of the top-50 thinkers for the COVID-19 era.

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 and New York Times bestseller.

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."

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 Kyiv."

Applebaum is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She is on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy and Renew Democracy Initiative. She was a member of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting's international board of directors. 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). She was on the editorial board for The American Interest and the Journal of Democracy.^[when?]

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 serves again as Minister of Foreign Affairs. The couple have two sons, Aleksander and Tadeusz. She became a Polish citizen in 2013. She speaks Polish and Russian in addition to English.

• 1992 Charles Douglas-Home Memorial Trust Award
• 2003 National Book Award Nonfiction, finalist, Gulag: A History
• 2003 Duff Cooper Prize for Gulag: A History
• 2004 Pulitzer Prize (General Non-Fiction), Gulag: A History
• 2008 Estonian Order of the Cross of Terra Mariana third class
• 2008 Lithuanian Millenium Star
• 2010 Petőfi Prize
• 2012 Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland
• 2012 National Book Award (Nonfiction), finalist, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944–1956
• 2013 Cundill Prize in Historical Literature, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944–1956
• 2013 Duke of Westminster's Medal for Military Literature, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944–1956
• 2017 Doctor of Humane Letters Honoris Causa, Georgetown University
• 2017 Honorary Doctorate, National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy
• 2017 Duff Cooper Prize for her book Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine
• 2017 Antonovych Prize
• 2018 Lionel Gelber Prize for her book Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine
• 2018 Honorary Fritz Stern Professor, University of Wrocław
• 2019 Premio Nonino "Maestro del nostro tempo" ("Master of our Time")
• 2019 Order of Princess Olga, third class
• 2021 National Magazine Awards finalist in categories "Essays and Criticism" and "Columns and Commentary"
• 2021 Premio Internacional de Periodismo de EL MUNDO
• 2022 Order of Princess Olga, second class

• 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
• 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
• Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine, Penguin Randomhouse, 2017
• 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

• Official website  
• 2005 Pulitzer Prize citation for Gulag: A History
• "Anne Applebaum, Opinion Writer" The Washington Post
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• 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.
• Anne Applebaum on the Muck Rack journalist listing site