Anne Applebaum

She also ran Beyond Propaganda, a program examining 21st century Propaganda and disinformation.

At the LSE, she ran Arena, a program on disinformation and 21st century Propaganda.

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.

Anne Elizabeth Applebaum (born July 25, 1964) is an American and naturalized-Polish journalist and historian.

She has written extensively about the history of Communism and the development of civil society in Central and Eastern Europe.

She graduated from the Sidwell Friends School in 1982.

Applebaum earned a Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude, in history and literature from Yale University, where she attended the Soviet history course taught by Wolfgang Leonhard in fall 1982.

As a student, Applebaum spent the summer of 1985 in Leningrad, Soviet Union (now Saint Petersburg, Russia), which, she has written, helped to shape her opinions.

She was also 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).

She 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 has worked at The Economist and The Spectator, and was a member of the editorial board of The Washington Post (2002–2006).

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.

Applebaum won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 2004 for Gulag: A History published the previous year.

She is a staff writer for The Atlantic and a senior fellow at The Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.

Applebaum was born in Washington, D.C. Applebaum has stated that she was brought up in a "very reform" Jewish family.

Her ancestors came to America from what is now Belarus.

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.

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.

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 the autumn of 2019 she moved the project to the Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University.

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."