Anne Applebaum

Anne Elizabeth Applebaum

Anne Elizabeth Applebaum (born July 25, 1964) is an American born Polish journalist and Pulitzer Prize–winning author.

Quotes

Before 2010

Gulag: A History (2003)

• The Western Right, on the other hand, did struggle to condemn Soviet crimes, but sometimes using methods that harmed their own cause. Surely the man who did the greatest damage to anti-communism was the American Senator Joe McCarthy. Recent documents showing that some of his accusations were correct do not change the impact of his overzealous pursuit of communists in American public life: ultimately, his public "trials" of communist sympathizers would tarnish the cause of anti-communism with the brush of chauvinism and intolerance. In the end, his actions served the cause of neutral historical inquiry no better than those of his opponents.

2012–2014

• [O]ne Western policy stands out as a phenomenal success, particularly when measured against the low expectations with which it began: the integration of Central Europe and the Baltic States into the European Union and NATO. Thanks to this double project, more than 90 million people have enjoyed relative safety and relative prosperity for more than two decades in a region whose historic instability helped launch two world wars.
  • "The myth of Russian humiliation" The Washington Post (October 17, 2014)

• Before joining NATO, each country had to establish civilian control of its army. Before joining the European Union, each adopted laws on trade, judiciary, human rights. As a result, they became democracies. This was “democracy promotion” working as it never has before or since.
  • "The myth of Russian humiliation" The Washington Post (October 17, 2014)

• For the record: No treaties prohibiting NATO expansion were ever signed with Russia. No promises were broken. Nor did the impetus for NATO expansion come from a “triumphalist” Washington. On the contrary, Poland’s first efforts to apply in 1992 were rebuffed...But Poland and others persisted, precisely because they were already seeing signs of the Russian revanchism to come.
  • "The myth of Russian humiliation" The Washington Post (October 17, 2014)

• When the slow, cautious expansion eventually took place, constant efforts were made to reassure Russia. No NATO bases were placed in the new member states, and until 2013 no exercises were conducted there. A Russia-NATO agreement in 1997 promised no movement of nuclear installations. A NATO-Russia Council was set up in 2002. In response to Russian objections, Ukraine and Georgia were, in fact, denied NATO membership plans in 2008.
  • "The myth of Russian humiliation" The Washington Post (October 17, 2014)

• The [2014] crisis in Ukraine, and the prospect of a further crisis in NATO itself, is not the result of our triumphalism but of our failure to react to Russia’s aggressive rhetoric and its military spending. Why didn’t we move NATO bases eastward a decade ago? Our failure to do so has now led to a terrifying plunge of confidence in Central Europe...Our mistake was not to humiliate Russia but to underrate Russia’s revanchist, revisionist, disruptive potential.
  • "The myth of Russian humiliation" The Washington Post (October 17, 2014)

• If the only real Western achievement of the past quarter-century is now under threat, that’s because we have failed to ensure that NATO continues to do in Europe what it was always meant to do: deter. Deterrence is not an aggressive policy; it is a defensive policy. But in order to work, deterrence has to be real.
  • "The myth of Russian humiliation" The Washington Post (October 17, 2014)

Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956 (2012)

• Before a nation can be rebuilt, its citizens need to understand how it was destroyed in the first place: how its institutions were undermined, how its language was twisted, how its people were manipulated

2017–2022

• Given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all societies eventually will.
  • "A Warning From Europe: The Worst is Yet to Come", The Atlantic (October 2018).

• Polarization is normal. Skepticism about liberal democracy is normal. And the appeal of authoritarianism is eternal.
  • "A Warning From Europe: The Worst is Yet to Come", The Atlantic (October 2018).

• If the 20th century was the story of slow, uneven progress toward the victory of liberal democracy over other ideologies—communism, fascism, virulent nationalism—the 21st century is, so far, a story of the reverse.
  • "The Bad Guys Are Winning", The Atlantic (November 15, 2021).
• The list of major American corporations caught in tangled webs of personal, financial, and business links to China, Russia, and other autocracies is very long.
  • "The Bad Guys Are Winning", The Atlantic (November 15, 2021).
• I don’t think Hunter Biden’s business relationships have anything to do with who should be president of the United States. So, I don’t find it [Hunter Biden's laptop] to be interesting. (April 6, 2022)
  • "Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum Rattled by Hunter Biden Question in Epic Own by Thinker’s Daniel Schmidt", Chicago Thinker (April 6, 2022)

Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine (2017)

Knopf Dounleday, 2017

• Stalin’s policies that autumn led inexorably to famine all across the grain-growing regions of the USSR. But in November and December 1932 he twisted the knife further in Ukraine, deliberately creating a deeper crisis. Step by step, using bureaucratic language and dull legal terminology, the Soviet leadership, aided by their cowed Ukrainian counterparts, launched a famine within the famine, a disaster specifically targeted at Ukraine and Ukrainians.

• The archival record backs up the testimony of the survivors. Neither crop failure nor bad weather caused the famine in Ukraine.
  • as quoted at "Ukraine in the Flames of the 1917 Revolution" (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, September 13, 2017)

• Starvation was the result, rather, of the forcible removal of food from people’s homes; the roadblocks that prevented peasants from seeking work or food; the harsh rules of the blacklists imposed on farms and villages; the restrictions on barter and trade; and the vicious propaganda campaign designed to persuade Ukrainians to watch, unmoved, as their neighbours died of hunger.
  • as quoted at "Ukraine in the Flames of the 1917 Revolution" (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, September 13, 2017)

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.

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