Anne Applebaum

**In 1991, Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of** Gulag **,** Iron Curtain **and** Red Famine **, took a three-month road trip through the borderlands between the fallen Soviet Union and Europe—lands that became Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania and Moldova. In her iconic reportage, which has become indispensable history, she captures the harrowing story of a region that is once again threatened by Russia.** An extraordinary journey into the past and present of the lands east of Poland and west of Russia—an area defined throughout its history by colliding empires. Traveling from the former Soviet naval center of Kaliningrad on the Baltic to the Black Sea port of Odessa, Anne Applebaum encounters a rich range of competing cultures, religions, and national aspirations. In reasserting their heritage, the inhabitants of the borderlands attempt to build a future grounded in their fractured ancestral legacies. In the process, neighbors unearth old conflicts, devote themselves to recovering lost culture, and piece together competing legends to create a new tradition. Rich in surprising encounters and vivid characters, *Between East and West* brilliantly illuminates the soul of the borderlands and the shaping power of the past.

<p>style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class=MsoNormal&gt;Anne Applebaum wields her considerable knowledge of a dark chapter in human history;and;presents a collection of the writings of;survivors of the Gulag, the Soviet concentration camps. Although;the opening of the Soviet archives to scholars;has made it;possible to write the history of;this notorious concentration camp system, documents;tell only one side of the story.;Gulag;Voices;now fills in the other half. style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class=MsoNormal&gt;; style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class=MsoNormal&gt;The;backgrounds;of the writers;reflect the extraordinary diversity of the Gulag;itself. Here are the personal stories of such figures; as Dmitri Likhachev, a renowned literary scholar; Anatoly Marchenko, the son of illiterate laborers; and Alexander Dolgun, an American citizen.;These;remembrances-;many of them appearing in English for the first time; each chosen for both literary;and;historical value-;collectively spotlight the strange moral universe of the camps, as well as the relationships that prisoners had with one another, with their guards, and with professional criminals who lived beside them. style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class=MsoNormal&gt;; style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class=MsoNormal&gt;A vital addition to;the;literature of this era, annotated for a generation that no longer remembers the;Soviet Union, "Gulag Voices; will inform, interest, and inspire, offering a source for reflection on human nature itself. style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class=MsoNormal&gt;; style="MARGIN: 0in 0.5in 0pt" class=MsoNorma</p> <p>Anne Applebaum wields her considerable knowledge of a dark chapter in human history and presents a collection of the writings of survivors of the Gulag, the Soviet concentration camps. Although the opening of the Soviet archives to scholars has made it possible to write the history of this notorious concentration camp system, documents tell only one side of the story. <I>Gulag Voices</I> now fills in the other half.<P>The backgrounds of the writers reflect the extraordinary diversity of the Gulag itself. Here are the personal stories of such figures as Dmitri Likhachev, a renowned literary scholar; Anatoly Marchenko, the son of illiterate laborers; and Alexander Dolgun, an American citizen. These remembrances&#8212;many of them appearing in English for the first time, each chosen for both literary and historical value&#8212;collectively spotlight the strange moral universe of the camps, as well as the relationships that prisoners had with one another, with their guards, and...

<p><strong>PULITZER PRIZE</strong> **WINNER • This magisterial and acclaimed history offers the first fully documented portrait of the Gulag, from its origins in the Russian Revolution, through its expansion under Stalin, to its collapse in the era of glasnost. </p> <p>“A tragic testimony to how evil ideologically inspired dictatorships can be.” –**The New York Times </p> <p>The Gulag—a vast array of Soviet concentration camps that held millions of political and criminal prisoners—was a system of repression and punishment that terrorized the entire society, embodying the worst tendencies of Soviet communism. Applebaum intimately re-creates what life was like in the camps and links them to the larger history of the Soviet Union. Immediately recognized as a landmark and long-overdue work of scholarship, <em>Gulag</em> is an essential book for anyone who wishes to understand the history of the twentieth century.</p> <p>PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • This magisterial and acclaimed history offers the first fully documented portrait of the Gulag, from its origins in the Russian Revolution, through its expansion under Stalin, to its collapse in the era of glasnost.</p> <p>“A tragic testimony to how evil ideologically inspired dictatorships can be.” –The New York Times The Gulag—a vast array of Soviet concentration camps that held millions of political and criminal prisoners—was a system of repression and punishment that terrorized the entire society, embodying the worst tendencies of Soviet communism. Applebaum intimately re-creates what life was like in the camps and links them to the larger history of the Soviet Union. Immediately recognized as a landmark and long-overdue work of scholarship, Gulag is an essential book for anyone who wishes to understand the history of the twentieth century.</p> <b>PULITZER PRIZE</b> <b>WINNER &bull; This magisterial and acclaimed history offers the first fully documented portrait of the Gulag, from its origins in the Russian Revolution, through its expansion under Stalin, to its collapse in the era of glasnost.<br>&ldquo;A tragic testimony to how evil ideologically inspired dictatorships can be.&rdquo; &ndash;<i>The New York Times</i> </b><br>The Gulag&mdash;a vast array of Soviet concentration camps that held millions of political and criminal prisoners&mdash;was a system of repression and punishment that terrorized the entire society, embodying the worst tendencies of Soviet communism.&#160;Applebaum intimately re-creates what life was like in the camps and links them to the larger history of the Soviet Union. Immediately recognized as a landmark and long-overdue work of scholarship, <i>Gulag</i> is an essential book for anyone who wishes to understand the history of the twentieth century. <b>PULITZER PRIZE</b> <b>WINNER &bull; This magisterial and acclaimed history offers the first fully documented portrait of the Gulag, from its origins in the Russian Revolution, through its expansion under Stalin, to its collapse in the era of glasnost.<br>&ldquo;A tragic testimony to how evil ideologically inspired dictatorships can be.&rdquo; &ndash;<i>The New York Times</i> </b><br>The Gulag&mdash;a vast array of Soviet concentration camps that held millions of political and criminal prisoners&mdash;was a system of repression and punishment that terrorized the entire society, embodying the worst tendencies of Soviet communism.&#160;Applebaum intimately re-creates what life was like in the camps and links them to the larger history of the Soviet Union. Immediately recognized as a landmark and long-overdue work of scholarship, <i>Gulag</i> is an essential book for anyone who wishes to understand the history of the twentieth century.

This landmark book uncovers for the first time in detail one of the greatest horrors of the twentieth century: the vast system of Soviet camps that were responsible for the deaths of countless millions. Gulag is the only major history in any language to draw together the mass of memoirs and writings on the Soviet camps that have been published in Russia and the West. Using these, as well as her own original research in NKVD archives and interviews with survivors, Anne Applebaum has written a fully documented history of the camp system: from its origins under the tsars, to its colossal expansion under Stalin's reign of terror, its zenith in the late 1940s and eventual collapse in the era of glasnost. It is a gigantic feat of investigation, synthesis and moral reckoning.

At the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union unexpectedly found itself in control of a huge swathe of territory in Eastern Europe. Stalin and his secret police set out to convert a dozen radically different countries to a completely new political and moral system: communism. In Iron Curtain, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Anne Applebaum describes how the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were created and what daily life was like once they were complete. Applebaum describes in devastating detail how political parties, the church, the media, young people's organizations - the institutions of civil society on every level - were quickly eviscerated. She explains how the secret police services were organized, how the media came to be dominated by communists, and how all forms of opposition were undermined and destroyed. Ranging widely across new archival material and many sources unknown in English, she follows the communists' tactics as they bullied, threatened and murdered their way to power. She also chronicles individual lives to show the choices people had to make - to fight, to flee, or to collaborate. Within a remarkably short period after the end of the war, Eastern Europe had been ruthlessly Stalinized. Iron Curtain is a brilliant history of a brutal period and a haunting reminder of how fragile free societies can be. Today the Soviet Bloc is a lost civilization, one whose cruelty, paranoia, bizarre morality, and strange aesthetics Anne Applebaum captures in the pages of this exceptional work of historical and moral reckoning.

**AN** ECONOMIST **BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR From the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning **Gulag** and the National Book Award finalist **Iron Curtain** , a revelatory history of one of Stalin's greatest crimes—the consequences of which still resonate today** In 1929 Stalin launched his policy of agricultural collectivization—in effect a second Russian revolution—which forced millions of peasants off their land and onto collective farms. The result was a catastrophic famine, the most lethal in European history. At least five million people died between 1931 and 1933 in the USSR. But instead of sending relief the Soviet state made use of the catastrophe to rid itself of a political problem. In *Red Famine* , Anne Applebaum argues that more than three million of those dead were Ukrainians who perished not because they were accidental victims of a bad policy but because the state deliberately set out to kill them. Applebaum proves what has long been suspected: after a series of rebellions unsettled the province, Stalin set out to destroy the Ukrainian peasantry. The state sealed the republic’s borders and seized all available food. Starvation set in rapidly, and people ate anything: grass, tree bark, dogs, corpses. In some cases, they killed one another for food. Devastating and definitive, *Red Famine* captures the horror of ordinary people struggling to survive extraordinary evil. Today, Russia, the successor to the Soviet Union, has placed Ukrainian independence in its sights once more. Applebaum’s compulsively readable narrative recalls one of the worst crimes of the twentieth century, and shows how it may foreshadow a new threat to the political order in the twenty-first.

A FINANCIAL TIMES, ECONOMIST AND NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020'The most important non-fiction book of the year' David HareIn the years just before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, people from across the political spectrum in Europe and America celebrated a great achievement, felt a common purpose and, very often, forged personal friendships. Yet over the following decades the euphoria evaporated, the common purpose and centre ground gradually disappeared, extremism rose once more and eventually - as this book compellingly relates - the relationships soured too. Anne Applebaum traces this history in an unfamiliar way, looking at the trajectories of individuals caught up in the public events of the last three decades. When politics becomes polarized, which side do you back? If you are a journalist, an intellectual, a civic leader, how do you deal with the re-emergence of authoritarian or nationalist ideas in your country? When your leaders appropriate history, or pedal conspiracies, or eviscerate the media and the judiciary, do you go along with it?Twilight of Democracy is an essay that combines the personal and the political in an original way and brings a fresh understanding to the dynamics of public life in Europe and America, both now and in the recent past.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • "How did our democracy go wrong? This extraordinary document ... is Applebaum's answer. " —Timothy Snyder, author of On TyrannyThe Pulitzer Prize–winning historian explains, with electrifying clarity, why elites in democracies around the world are turning toward nationalism and authoritarianism. From the United States and Britain to continental Europe and beyond, liberal democracy is under siege, while authoritarianism is on the rise. In Twilight of Democracy, Anne Applebaum, an award-winning historian of Soviet atrocities who was one of the first American journalists to raise an alarm about antidemocratic trends in the West, explains the lure of nationalism and autocracy. In this captivating essay, she contends that political systems with radically simple beliefs are inherently appealing, especially when they benefit the loyal to the exclusion of everyone else. Elegantly written and urgently argued, Twilight of Democracy is a brilliant dissection of a world-shaking shift and a stirring glimpse of the road back to democratic values.