Anne Applebaum drove from Warsaw to Berlin to watch the Wall come down
In November 1989 a young Economist correspondent based in Warsaw got in a car and headed for Berlin as the Wall fell. Anne Applebaum spent the following decades chronicling communism's machinery, winning a Pulitzer for her history of the Soviet camp system and later becoming a Polish citizen.
She was born on July 25, 1964, in Washington, D.C., the eldest of three daughters in a Reform Jewish family; her father was a senior antitrust lawyer and her mother worked at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Her great-grandparents had emigrated from what is now Belarus under Tsar Alexander III. At Yale she studied Soviet history under Wolfgang Leonhard, and a summer in Leningrad in 1985 helped shape her views. After graduating in 1986 she took a Marshall Scholarship to the London School of Economics, studied at St Antony's College, Oxford, and moved to Warsaw in 1988.
Reporting for The Economist and The Independent, she covered the collapse of communism, then returned to London in 1991, later serving as foreign editor and deputy editor of The Spectator and political editor of the Evening Standard. Her first book, in 1994, was a travelogue about nationalism rising in the new states along Europe's eastern borderlands.
The histories followed. Gulag, published in 2003, took the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 2004. Iron Curtain, in 2012, traced how Moscow crushed Eastern Europe between 1944 and 1956. Red Famine in 2017 examined the Holodomor, the man-made famine of 1932 to 1933 in Soviet Ukraine; it won the Lionel Gelber Prize and gave her a second Duff Cooper Prize, a double no other writer has achieved.
Alongside books she sat on The Washington Post's editorial board from 2002 to 2006 and wrote a column there for 17 years. At the Legatum Institute she ran a forum on political transitions until 2016, when she left over the think tank's stance on Brexit. She then built a programme on disinformation and modern propaganda at the LSE and moved it in 2019 to the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins. She took Polish citizenship in 2013 and writes for The Atlantic.
Source: Anne Applebaum
