True Believers: Collaboration and Opposition under Totalitarian Regimes
The horrifying genius of Soviet communism, imposed by force on Soviet-occupied Europe, was the system’s ability to get the silent majority in so many countries to play along without much protest.
Anne Applebaum explains how carefully targeted violence, propaganda and the state’s monopoly on economic and civic institutions persuaded populations to ‘go along’, illustrated with individual stories.
/ /
The Gulag: What We Know Now and Why it Matters
Since the archives of the Gulag system became available to researchers in the 1990s, historians’ previously sketchy understanding of the Soviet concentration camp system has come more sharply into focus.
We now understand far better what the Gulag was, how it evolved, what purposes it served, how many people lived and died within it. Anne Applebaum asks what we really remember of the camp system and why it’s not an issue for debate in modern Russia.
/ /
Putinism - The Ideology
Anne Applebaum argues that Vladimir Putin cannot be dismissed as a thuggish or thoughtless authoritarian leader.
She explains the sophisticated institutional and ideological underpinnings of ‘Putinism’ as an ideology including foreign policy, history, and education.
/ /
Does Eastern Europe Still Exist?
During the Cold War, the nations of the region we called 'Eastern Europe' were closely linked. Since 1989 they have made different choices and taken different paths.
Anne Applebaum argues that the label ‘Eastern Europe’ is no longer relevant to a diverse region that can offer crucial lessons in transition to the rest of the world.
/ /
Seminar
Anne Applebaum taught a seminar titled The History of the Soviet Union and the Post-Soviet Transition.
Other events
Whilst Philippe Roman Chair Anne Applebaum also took part in the America and the World After the Election debate, reacting to the re-election of President Barack Obama that month, with Craig Calhoun, Michael Cox and Gideon Rachman.
Black Earth: the Holocaust as History and Warning
In 2015, Anne Applebaum chaired this lecture by fellow Philippe Roman Chair Timothy Snyder, where they discussed the role that the destruction of states played in the Holocaust and how their study of Easter European history shaped their reactions to the 2014 crisis in Ukraine.
/
About Anne Applebaum
Anne Applebaum is a columnist for the Washington Post and Slate and Director of the Transitions Forum at the . Her book Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956, won the Cundill Prize for Historical Literature, the Duke of Westminster Medal, and an Arthur Ross Silver Medal from the Council on Foreign Relations.