Applebaum was born in
Washington, D.C.,[2] 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.[9] Applebaum has stated that she was brought up in a "very
reform" Jewish family.[10] 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.[11] 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.[12] Applebaum received her BA from Yale in 1986 summa cum laude, in history and literature,[13][11] 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).[14] She also studied at
St Antony's College, Oxford, before becoming a correspondent for The Economist and moving to
Warsaw, Poland, in 1988.[15]
In November 1989, Applebaum drove from Warsaw to Berlin to report on the collapse of the
Berlin Wall.[16]
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.[18] In 2001, she interviewed prime minister
Tony Blair.[19] 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.[6][20][21] It was also nominated for a National Book Award, for the Los Angeles Times book award and for the
National Book Critics Circle Award.[22]
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,[26] created the Future of Syria[27] and Future of Iran projects[28] on future institutional change in those two countries, and commissioned a series of papers on corruption in Georgia,[29] Moldova[30] and Ukraine.[31]
Together with Foreign Policy magazine she created Democracy Lab, a website focusing on countries in transition to, or away from, democracy[32] and which has since become Democracy Post[33] at The Washington Post. She also ran Beyond Propaganda,[34] 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
EuroskepticPhilippa Stroud as CEO[35] 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.[36] In the autumn of 2019 she moved the project to the Agora Institute at
Johns Hopkins University.[8]
In November 2019, The Atlantic announced that Applebaum was joining the publication as a staff writer starting in January 2020.[23] She was included in the 2020 Prospect list of the top-50 thinkers for the
COVID-19 era.[40]
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."[43]
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."[44]
Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe, Pantheon, 1994, reprinted by Random House, 1995; Penguin, 2015; and Anchor, 2017,
ISBN0679421505
^Ivan Krastev (August 15, 2020).
"The Tragic Romance of the Nostalgic Western Liberal". Foreign Policy. Retrieved November 15, 2022. On Nov. 10, 1989, Applebaum, then a young reporter, jumped in a car in the company of her soon-to-be husband—future Polish Foreign and Defense Minister Radek Sikorski—and drove from Warsaw to Berlin to see with her own eyes the collapse of the Berlin Wall. 1989 was the point of departure of everything that Applebaum did in the following three decades. Her much-praised history books about the Soviet Gulag and the establishment of the communist regimes in Central Europe were her historical introduction to the inevitability of 1989.
^"Anne Applebaum". The Nine Dots Prize. Retrieved September 1, 2022.
^"Russia Bans Entry To Biden's Siblings, US Senators". Agence France Press. Barrons. November 11, 2022. Retrieved November 13, 2022. The [Russian] foreign ministry said the 200 US nationals included officials and legislators, their close relatives, heads of companies and experts "involved in the promotion of the Russophobic campaign and support for the regime in Kyiv" ... [including] US writer and Russia expert Anne Applebaum
^"Minister of Foreign Affairs Radosław Sikorski". Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland. April 23, 2008.
Archived from the original on April 11, 2008. Retrieved April 23, 2008. Radosław Sikorski is married to journalist and writer Anne Applebaum, who won the 2004 Pulitzer prize for her book "Gulag: A History". They have two sons: Aleksander and Tomasz.
^Fitzpatrick, Sheila (August 25, 2017).
"Red Famine by Anne Applebaum review – did Stalin deliberately let Ukraine starve?". The Guardian. Retrieved August 25, 2017. For scholars, the most interesting part of the book will be the two excellent historiographical chapters in which she teases out the political and scholarly impulses tending to minimise the famine in Soviet times ('The Cover-Up') and does the same for post-Soviet Ukrainian exploitation of the issue ('The Holodomor in History and Memory')
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.