Anne Applebaum: Reporting on Autocracy

‘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’, Anne Applebaum wrote in 2021 in The Atlantic. And Russia hadn’t even invaded Ukraine yet…

Applebaum’s entire journalistic career has revolved around Russia and its neighboring countries. Through this, Applebaum has witnessed democracies emerge up close – and sometimes collapse again. Applebaum studied history and literature at Yale and specialized in Soviet history. In 1988, she moved to Poland as a correspondent for The Economist, where she reported on the collapse of communism and the first free Polish elections won by Lech Wałęsa’s Solidarność. Later on she covered the fall of the Berlin Wall. In this period she also met her husband, Radoslaw Sikorski, the current Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs. 

Applebaum received the Pulitzer Prize in 2004 for her monumental work Gulag, which chronicles the history of the Soviet forced labor camps where millions of people were imprisoned and perished during Stalin’s reign. In 2017, she published Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine, about the Holodomor – the deliberate starvation of the Ukrainian people by Stalin’s regime.

Up close, Applebaum witnessed in the early 2000s how Putin smothered the young Russian democracy in its cradle

In the 1990s, Applebaum was a convinced liberal who believed that history – following the words of Francis Fukuyama – had ended. But she quickly saw that capitalism and free trade, at least in Russia, did not go hand in hand with freedom. Up close, Applebaum witnessed in the early 2000s how Putin smothered the young Russian democracy in its cradle.

Today, autocracy is back in fashion, though be it in a different form than in the 20th century. Whereas the previous century was marked by an ideological battle of -isms, modern autocrats nowadays are mostly interested in self-enrichment, not even pretending anymore to care for human rights or democracy, Applebaum argues in her latest book, Autocracy Inc. Dictators like Putin, Kim Jong-Un, or Lukashenko view their countries primarily as profit-generating enterprises to make themselves filthy rich. The same goes for hybrid regimes like Hungary, where corruption runs rampant. Because ideology no longer matters, modern autocracies more than ever form a network of collaboration, Applebaum warns. They finance each other, arm each other, and cover for one another – all to undermine the liberal order.