Anne Applebaum

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