Anne Applebaum

Anne Applebaum (born 25 July 1964) is a neoconservative journalist and Pulitzer Prize -winning author who has written extensively about communism and the development of civil society in Eastern Europe and the USSR / Russia. She is a columnist for the Washington Post and a former member of its editorial board. She also writes a column for Slate and was previously an editor at The Economist and deputy editor of The Spectator.

Biography

Born in Washington, DC in 1964, she was a 1982 graduate of the Sidwell Friends School. She attended Yale University, and was a Marshall Scholar at the London School of Economics and St Antony's College, Oxford before moving to Warsaw, Poland in 1988. Working for The Economist, she provided firsthand (unsigned) 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.

Applebaum was originally booked on the Pan Am Flight 103 from London to New York City during its disaster flight on 21 December 1988. However, a week before take-off, she postponed her journey by one day in order to visit friends at Oxford.

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 the workings of Parliament, and on issues foreign and domestic.

Applebaum's first book, Between East and West, is a travelogue, and was awarded an Adolph Bentinck Prize in 1996. Her second book, Gulag: A History, was published in 2003 and was awarded the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction writing. The Pulitzer committee named Gulag a "landmark work of historical scholarship and an indelible contribution to the complex, ongoing, necessary quest for truth."

Applebaum is fluent in English, French, Polish and Russian. She is married to Radoslaw Sikorski, a Polish politician and writer who was Polish Minister of National Defence in the Marcinkiewicz and Kaczynski government from 31 October 2005 to 6 February 2007. Now he is Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Donald Tusk government. They have two children, Alexander and Tadeusz.

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

Anne Applebaum is a George Herbert Walker Bush/ Axel Springer Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany, for spring 2008.

British Neocon connections

In 1995 The Guardian reported on the '21st Century Tories':

From the outside it is not always easy to see the novelty in the various mutations of conservative thinking that well-up out of the party's troubles. Successive generations of young Tory thinkers appear much the same - well spoken Oxbridge graduates, astir with the decline of Britain and the conservative establishment. Is there anything really so new about Roberts, or indeed Matthew D'Ancona (Times and Fellow of All Souls), Niall Ferguson (Telegraph and Don at Jesus College, Oxford), Michael Gove (BBC and former president of the Oxford Union), Anne Applebaum (Yale and deputy editor of the Spectator), Paul Goodman (Telegraph and former chairman of the Federation of Conservative Students) and Dean Godson (Telegraph)?

Well, yes. The first obvious distinction is that its members come from widely different backgrounds and that most of them were literally children of the sixties. Gove and D'Ancona were products of standard middle-class families and although Roberts has the whiff of the grand Tory about him, he picks his friends, according to one of The Group, "to find the same mindset and congenial companions, rather than attempt to create a young England clique". Most of them have links with, or were at, Oxford - unlike their predecessors in the seventies who had strong connections with Peterhouse College, Cambridge. Quite a number are Jewish - Goodman, Godson, Applebaum and Danny Finkelstein, who was originally a member of the SDP but is now regarded by his friends as veering rapidly to the right. "One thing you can say about us," said Roberts, "is that we are extremely philo-semitic."

There are other members - banker Oliver Letwin, Steve Hilton who used to work for Saatchi & Saatchi and is now a prospective Tory candidate, Sheila Lawlor, an historian and education expert for the Centre for Policy Studies and Martin Ivens of the Times. The important thing is that most of them met after university and have come to know each other because of the congruity of their views. In this sense, The Group is a network which is spread through history departments, journalism, advertising and, in one instance, radio. As you would expect its main outlets are The Times, but more important is the Telegraph Group, which also includes the Spectator.

Affiliations and connections

Affiliations

• American Enterprise Institute
• The Spectator

Connections

• Robert Conquest
• Dean Godson

Further reading

• Anne Applebaum, Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe, Pantheon Books, October, 1994, hardcover, ISBN 0-679-42150-5; another hardcover edition, Random House, 1995, ISBN 0-517-15906-6 Introduction online
• Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History, Doubleday, April, 2003, hardcover, 677 pages, ISBN 0-7679-0056-1; trade paperback, Bantam Dell, 11 May, 2004, 736 pages, ISBN 1-4000-3409-4 Introduction online

Contact, References and Resources

Contact

Blog: AnneApplebaum.com

Resources

• 2005 Pulitzer Prize citation for Gulag: A History
• Opinions, Washington Post (free registration required)
• GULAG: Many Days, Many Lives, Online Exhibit, Center for History and New Media, George Mason University
• Gulag: Forced Labor Camps, Online Exhibition, Open Society Archives
• Map of Gulag
• Map of labour camps all over the USSR
• Virtual Gulag Museum
• New York Times article of June 11, 2003, "Camps of Terror, Often Overlooked", by Michael Mcfaul
• A Movie That Matters — Applebaum's review of Andrzej Wajda movie Katyń
• The Economics of Forced Labour: The Soviet Gulag (ed. by Paul Gregory, Valery Lazarev), Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2003
• The Gulag Collection: Paintings by Former Prisoner Nikolai Getman
• Gulag prisoners at work, 1936-1937 Photoalbum at NYPL Digital Gallery
• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: "Saving the Nation Is the Utmost Priority for the State" interview in Moscow News (Aug. 26, 2007)
• GULAG 113 - Canadian film about Estonians in the GULAG
• Gulag Collection of publications and photo about Gulag by IPV News (Russian). However, correctness of the site's contents is disputed (Russian). See discussion.
• Solovetsky camp
• THE GULAG Revelations from the Russian Archives at Library of Congress
• Gulag: A History (Doubleday, 2003), a review by Hans Sherrer for Justice:Denied magazine