Part of George Mason University's "Russia's War on Ukraine in Historical Perspective"
A conversation between Anne Applebaum and Steve Barnes focusing on how she uses history to understand Russia's war on Ukraine.
Anne Applebaum has built a career over the past 25 years as a wide-ranging public intellectual--a renowned popular historian of Ukraine, eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union and a highly-respected columnist and staff writer focused on politics not only in eastern Europe but also in the United States. How is her historical research reflected in her writing on current events? How does her work on the history of the Gulag, the Sovietization of eastern Europe, or the Holodomor inform her understanding of Russia's criminal war on Ukraine? Applebaum will answer these questions and many more in a wide-ranging and open conversation and q&a about how history writes the present.
Anne Applebaum is a staff writer for The Atlantic and a Pulitzer-prize winning historian. She is also a Senior Fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the Agora Institute, where she co-directs Arena, a program on disinformation and 21st century propaganda. In addition to her voluminous writings in publications including The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Foreign Affairs, and many others, she is the author of Gulag: A History winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956, and Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine. Applebaum's newest book is Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism.
Anne Applebaum was interviewed by Steven Barnes, Director of the Program in Russian and Eurasian Studies and Associate Professor in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University. He is the series organizer and teaches and researches broadly on the history of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, modern Russia, Kazakhstan, and the other independent countries from this imperial space.