Anne Applebaum is a Pulitzer-prize winning historian, a staff writer for The Atlantic, an international university lecturer.

Born in Washington, D.C., Applebaum earned her undergraduate degree at Yale University and was a Marshall Scholar at the London School of Economics and St. Anthony’s College, Oxford. Currently, she is a senior fellow of international affairs and Agora fellow in residence at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where she co-directs a program on 21st century propaganda.

Earlier, Applebaum was a Washington Post columnist for 15 years, a member of the paper’s editorial board, and worked as the foreign and deputy editor of the Spectator magazine in London. She covered the collapse of communism as the Warsaw correspondent of the Economist magazine and the Independent newspaper.

Applebaum’s book Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine received the Lionel Gelber Prize in 2018 and Gulag: A History won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 2004. Both books, along with Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956, have been translated into more than 24 languages. Her most recent book, published in 2020, is Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism.

Applebaum is married to Radoslaw Sikorski, is a Polish politician and writer, with whom she has two children.

“Russia is not a flawed Western power. Russia is an anti-Western power with a different, darker vision of global politics”