n excellent journalist, Anne Applebaum was a foreign correspondent for The Economist and The Independent and reported on the fall of the Berlin Wall. She later worked for The Spectator and the Evening Standard. She’s now a staff writer for The Atlantic.
Anne Applebaum’s books cover subjects including Stalin’s war on Ukraine, the Iron Curtain, the Soviet gulags, Putinism, democracy, and the lure of autocrats. Her deep knowledge of the Cold War and Russia makes her an authoritative voice on Putin’s war against Ukraine and on the threats to democracy and the post–World War II order from a hot war, subterfuge, and the baffling reversal in the American Republican Party, which is pivoting away from Europe and traditional allies and toward Russia.
I take every chance I can to read Applebaum’s articles in The Atlantic and follow her analysis of current events on podcasts, social media, and TV. She is one of the most illuminating foreign affairs experts in the media today.
Her award-winning books include Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956, which delves into the Soviet Union’s autocracy after the Second World War. Iron Curtain was a National Book Award finalist.
Applebaum won the Pulitzer Prize for Gulag: A History, in which she describes the Soviet concentration camp system, drawing on newly opened Russian archives among other sources.
Another prize winner, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine, probes how nearly four million Ukrainians died in Stalin’s famine, a history that informs the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
In 2022, Russia sanctioned Applebaum for “Promotion of the Russophobia campaign and support for the regime in Kiev.”
I’ve read her two most recent books, Autocracy, Inc. and Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism.
Autocracy, Inc. explores how autocracies are bound together by financial, security, and propaganda networks. Autocracies run on transactional, state-controlled corruption and detest democracy and the freedoms and rule of law that have been fundamental to the Western world.
Twilight of Democracy investigates how liberal democracies are being undermined by populism and nationalism, a deeply disturbing trend we see unfolding in the world today.
Anne Applebaum’s books contain some of the most relevant history published in the twenty-first century on totalitarianism and democracy.
Books
- Autocracy, Inc.
- Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism
- Gulag: A History
- Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine
- Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956
- Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe
- Putinism: The Ideology
Audiobooks
- Autocracy, Inc.
- Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism
- Gulag: A History
- Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine
- Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956
- Obama and Europe
Anne Applebaum Quotes
- “Sometimes the point isn’t to make people believe a lie; it’s to make people fear the liar.”
- “This form of soft dictatorship does not require mass violence to stay in power. Instead, it relies upon a cadre of elites to run the bureaucracy, the state media, the courts, and, in some places, state companies.”
- “Authoritarianism appeals, simply, to people who cannot tolerate complexity: there is nothing intrinsically “left-wing” or “right-wing” about this instinct at all. It is anti-pluralist. It is suspicious of people with different ideas. It is allergic to fierce debates. Whether those who have it ultimately derive their politics from Marxism or nationalism is irrelevant. It is a frame of mind, not a set of ideas.”
- “Before a nation can be rebuilt, its citizens need to understand how it was destroyed in the first place: how its institutions were undermined, how its language was twisted, how its people were manipulated.”
- “The emotional appeal of a conspiracy theory is in its simplicity. It explains away complex phenomena, accounts for chance and accidents, offers the believer the satisfying sense of having special, privileged access to the truth. For those who become the one-party state’s gatekeepers, the repetition of these conspiracy theories also brings another reward: power.”
- “People have always had different opinions. Now they have different facts.”
- Unlike Marxism, the illiberal one-party state is not a philosophy. It is a mechanism for holding power, and it functions happily alongside many ideologies.”
- “Democracy itself has always been loud and raucous, but when its rules are followed, it eventually creates consensus. The modern debate does not. Instead, it inspires in some people the desire to forcibly silence the rest.”
- Totalitarian regimes, they declared, all had at least five things in common: a dominant ideology, a single ruling party, a secret police force prepared to use terror, a monopoly on information, and a planned economy. By those criteria, the Soviet and Nazi regimes were not the only totalitarian states. Others—Mao’s China, for example—qualified too.”
- “This book was not written ‘so that it will not happen again’, as the cliché would have it. This book was written because it almost certainly will happen again. Totalitarian philosophies have had, and will continue to have, a profound appeal to many millions of people.”
- “Efficiency, liberty, justice, equality, the demands of the individual, and the demands of the group—all these things push us in different directions. And this, Berlin wrote, is unacceptable to many people:”
- “Throughout history, pandemics have led to an expansion of the power of the state: at times when people fear death, they go along with measures that they believe, rightly or wrongly, will save them—even if that means a loss of freedom.”
- “Plato feared the “false and braggart words” of the demagogue, and suspected democracy might be nothing more than a staging point on the road to tyranny.”
- “We have long known that in closed societies, the arrival of democracy, with its clashing voices and differing opinions, can be “complex and frightening,” as Stenner puts it, for people unaccustomed to public dissent.”
- “Most of the people buying the Soviet paraphernalia were Americans and West Europeans. All would be sickened by the thought of wearing a swastika. None objected, however, to wearing the hammer and sickle on a T-shirt or a hat.”
- “There can be no neutrality in a polarized world because there can be no nonpartisan or apolitical institutions.”
- “Given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all of our societies eventually will.”
- “Allegiance to a belief system can have deep, non-rational roots.”
Find books by Anne Applebaum on Audiobooks, Amazon/Audible, and Bookstores who are not Amazon.
We hope you enjoyed learning more about books by Anne Applebaum. You might also like books by Rebecca Solnit. Also, see Best Political Books to Read in 2026.
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