Anne Applebaum

Saturday

25 Jan 2020
Anne Applebaum

Torture a Tory, make him an MEP? Not any more

‘Epiphany.’ That was the word that Robert Rowland, soon-to-be-ex-MEP for the Brexit party, used to describe his discovery of the real inner workings of the European parliament. I met Rowland in Strasbourg, a mere eight months after his election last May, at his very last plenary session. With no small degree of pride, he showed me around the debating chamber, with its sleek interior and its hi-tech voting machines. He told me about the ‘very high-quality’ people he had met, such as Nathalie Loiseau, the former French Minister for European Affairs. So interesting, so affable! Some of them — he mentioned a former Czech minister — even know quite a lot about economics! I asked if he was going to regret leaving all of this behind on 31 January and he quickly reversed gear.

Torture a Tory, make him an MEP? Not any more

Thursday

20 Sep 2018
Anne Applebaum

The wrong right

To the inhabitants of the British Isles, the nations of central Europe have always existed in a semi--mythical space, near enough to be recognised as somehow European, but too distant to be taken seriously. Neville Chamberlain dismissed them as ‘faraway countries of which we know little’; Shakespeare gave landlocked Bohemia a coastline. In British school textbooks, Poland appears for the first time in 1939 and then vanishes again, just as abruptly. In the feverish politics of the Brexit era, central Europe has once again returned — and, once again, it is in a semi-mythical form. This time, the region is playing the role of an imaginary alternative Europe, one perfectly suited to the needs of Brexiteers. In their imagination, the illiberal ruling parties of Poland and Hungary are bravely standing up to leftist tyranny, boldly joining Steve Bannon and the intellectual descendants of Mussolini to build a Europe free of Muslims, Brussels bureaucracy and the remnants of communist ideology.

The wrong right

Friday

29 Jul 2016
Anne Applebaum

If Trump wins the White House, the US could be finished as a world power

Spy novels and James Bond movies; post-war Vienna and East Berlin; Manchurian candidates and Third Men. The pop culture of the Cold War era created a set of stereotypes about hostile foreign intelligence services, especially Russian intelligence services, and they still exist. We still imagine undercover agents, dead drops, messages left under park benches, microphones inside fountain pens. It’s time to forget all of that, because the signature Russian intelligence operation of the future, and indeed of the present, is not going to unfold in secret, but rather in public. It’s not going to involve stolen documents, but rather disinformation operations designed to influence democratic elections. It’s not going to use cash, but rather open support for candidates who will weaken Nato and the European Union, the two organisations which pose the greatest threat to President Vladimir Putin’s personal power.

If Trump wins the White House, the US could be finished as a world power

Thursday

28 Jul 2016
Anne Applebaum

Trump ♥ Putin

Spy novels and James Bond movies; post-war Vienna and East Berlin; Manchurian candidates and Third Men. The pop culture of the Cold War era created a set of stereotypes about hostile foreign intelligence services, especially Russian intelligence services, and they still exist. We still imagine undercover agents, dead drops, messages left under park benches, microphones inside fountain pens. It’s time to forget all of that, because the signature Russian intelligence operation of the future, and indeed of the present, is not going to unfold in secret, but rather in public. It’s not going to involve stolen documents, but rather disinformation operations designed to influence democratic elections. It’s not going to use cash, but rather open support for candidates who will weaken Nato and the European Union, the two organisations which pose the greatest threat to President Vladimir Putin’s personal power.

Trump ♥ Putin

Friday

22 Apr 2016
Anne Applebaum

Yes, Obama may be deeply annoying. But on Europe, he’s right

[audioplayer src="http://feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/260046943-the-spectator-podcast-obamas-eu-intervention-the-pms.mp3" title="Janet Daley and Freddy Gray discuss Obama's overreach" startat=27] Listen [/audioplayer]You don’t like Barack Obama’s foreign policy? Fine, I don’t either. You are impatient to know who the next president will be? Me too. But if you think that the current American president’s trip to the UK this week is some kind of fanciful fling, or that his arguments against Brexit represent the last gasp of his final term in office, then you are deeply mistaken. In Washington, the opposition to a British withdrawal from the European Union is deep, broad and bipartisan, shared by liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans alike.

Yes, Obama may be deeply annoying. But on Europe, he’s right

Thursday

21 Apr 2016
Anne Applebaum

He speaks for America

[audioplayer src="http://feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/260046943-the-spectator-podcast-obamas-eu-intervention-the-pms.mp3" title="Janet Daley and Freddy Gray discuss Obama's overreach" startat=27] Listen [/audioplayer]You don’t like Barack Obama’s foreign policy? Fine, I don’t either. You are impatient to know who the next president will be? Me too. But if you think that the current American president’s trip to the UK this week is some kind of fanciful fling, or that his arguments against Brexit represent the last gasp of his final term in office, then you are deeply mistaken. In Washington, the opposition to a British withdrawal from the European Union is deep, broad and bipartisan, shared by liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans alike.

He speaks for America

Thursday

21 Jan 2016

Thursday

19 Feb 2015
Anne Applebaum

How Vladimir Putin is waging war on the West – and winning

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/Viewfrom22-19Feb2015.mp3" title="Anne Applebaum and Ben Judah discuss Putin's grand strategy" startat=34] Listen [/audioplayer]Last month, the speaker of the Russian parliament solemnly instructed his foreign affairs committee to launch a historical investigation: was West Germany’s ‘annexation’ of East Germany really legal? Should it be condemned? Ought it to be reversed? Last week, the Russian foreign minister, speaking at a security conference in Munich, hinted that he might have similar doubts. ‘Germany’s reunification was conducted without any referendum,’ he declared, ominously. At this, the normally staid audience burst out laughing. The Germans in the room found the Russian statements particularly hilarious.

How Vladimir Putin is waging war on the West – and winning

Thursday

4 Dec 2014
Anne Applebaum

The crash of the ruble — and what’s next for Russia

Since the Russian invasion of Crimea last February, many different phrases have been used to describe the tactics of the Russian President, Vladimir Putin. Some have spoken of a ‘new Cold War’. Others have described him as ‘anti-western’ or ‘anti-American’. But there is another adjective one could also use to describe his behaviour: ‘experimental’. For apart from everything else he has said and done, Putin has, in effect, launched a vast experiment into whether it is possible to extract a large and relatively well-integrated country from the global mainstream, and to reject the rules by which that mainstream runs. In truth, the experiment began long before Crimea. For several years now, Russia, a member of the World Trade Organisation, has defied the spirit of that institution by using selective trade boycotts — Lithuanian cheese, Polish meat — to make political points.

The crash of the ruble — and what’s next for Russia

Thursday

10 Apr 2014
Anne Applebaum

An escape to the country that became a struggle for Poland’s soul

In 1993, John Borrell, a longtime foreign correspondent with no permanent home, decided to abandon journalism. Tired of writing about wars and violence — he had been in Beirut, Rwanda and Nicaragua — he determined to throw himself into European rural life. But instead of a year in Provence, he chose 20 years in Kaszubia, northeast Poland. Borrell, originally from New Zealand, had married a Pole. They bought an exquisite piece of land beside a pristine lake, and there they built a boutique hotel. I was a Warsaw correspondent at about the same time as Borrell, and remember a certain amount of head-shaking over this venture. Even by Polish standards, Kaszubia is deeply provincial; many Kaszubians speak their own dialect, incomprehensible to other Poles, and in the early 1990s there were still Kaszubian villagers who lived without electricity and running water, let alone paved roads.

An escape to the country that became a struggle for Poland’s soul

Monday

3 Mar 2014
Anne Applebaum

Letting Russia into the G8 gave tacit approval to Putinism

Expelling Russia from the G8 is an option being urged on Barack Obama this morning. The logic for admitting Russia in the first place was always tenuous - as Anne Applebaum argued in the Spectator when it last hosted the summit. For sale, the advertisement might read: One very large Russian energy company. Estimated assets, including oil wells, reserves, refineries: $60 billion. Possible liabilities: four major international lawsuits, a part-time CEO who works full-time as President Vladimir Putin’s deputy chief of staff, and a certain — shall we say — lack of clarity about whether the company legally acquired most of those assets at all. I am talking here about Rosneft, the very large Russian energy company whose shares go on sale in London next week.

Letting Russia into the G8 gave tacit approval to Putinism

Thursday

12 Dec 2013
Anne Applebaum

Secrets of the Kremlin

A building bearing testimony to the power of eternal Russia; a timeless symbol of the Russian state; a monument to Russian sovereignty. To the modern eye, the Kremlin fortress seems as if it had always been there, as if it had never changed and never will. All of which is utter nonsense, as Catherine Merridale’s fascinating history reveals: the story of this famous compound is not one of continuity, but of construction, destruction and reconstruction. Every reincarnation of the Russian state over the centuries — and there have been many — has been accompanied by a corresponding reincarnation of the Kremlin. Its history is thus a metaphorical history of Russia, as Merridale understands very well. ‘If states have trademarks,’ she writes, ‘Russia’s could well be this fortress, viewed across Red Square.

Secrets of the Kremlin

Thursday

12 Sep 2013
Anne Applebaum

Time for our leaders to stop talking about ‘justice’ in Syria if we can’t or won’t enforce it

‘It’s about chemical weapons. Their use is wrong and the world shouldn’t stand idly by.’ — David Cameron, 27 August ‘The chemical massacre in Damascus cannot and must not go unpunished.’ — François Hollande, 30 August ‘We lead with the belief that right makes might, not the other way around.’ — Barack Obama, 31 August In their speech, in their manner and in their choice of language, the American President, the French President and the British Prime Minister have been impeccably clear about their motivations for military intervention in Syria. They don’t want to use force for economic gain. They aren’t in this for national interest. Strictly speaking, they aren’t moved by humanitarian reasons, either. During the two years of fighting in Syria, more than 100,000 people have died, and more than two -million have been displaced.

Time for our leaders to stop talking about ‘justice’ in Syria if we can’t or won’t enforce it

Thursday

13 Jun 2013
Anne Applebaum

Why are we all so shocked by Prism?

I am trying very hard to understand why everyone is shocked — shocked! — by news that the US government helps itself to the massive data flows generated by Google, Facebook and Twitter. I have always assumed that something placed into an internet database is no more secret than something written in a letter. We all know that those pop-up advertisements — so amazingly compatible with what we searched for on Facebook ten minutes ago — aren’t there by accident. But if we aren’t bothered when ruthlessly efficient multinational corporations troll through our data in order to earn billions for their teenage CEOs, why are we bothered when the comparatively inept US government does the same while searching for terrorists? I reckon my own Gmail correspondence is kept relatively safe by two things: greed — and boredom.

Why are we all so shocked by Prism?

Saturday

2 Jun 2012
Anne Applebaum

Love conquers all

Anyone who has ever written a history book will feel a twinge of envy on reading the preface to Just Send Me Word: We opened up the largest of the trunks. I had never seen anything like it: several thousand letters tightly stacked in bundles tied with string and rubber bands, notebooks, diaries, documents and photographs…It was a unique family archive, the property of Svetlana and Lev Mishchenko, and it contained, among other things, packets of their love letters.  The two had met as university students in Moscow in the 1930s, but their relationship was cut short by the outbreak of war. Lev joined the Red Army in 1940, fought near Moscow but then fell into German captivity. Upon returning to the Soviet Union in 1945 he was arrested — a common fate for Soviet ex-POWs, who were automatically considered traitors — and he remained in the Gulag until 1954.

Saturday

31 Dec 2011
Anne Applebaum

Russia’s new dissidents

Alexei Navalny, the de facto leader of the demonstrators who thronged freezing Moscow on Christmas Eve, minces no words. On ­rospil.info, a website he founded that is dedicated to the investigation of local and municipal corruption, he introduces the topic like this: ‘Why is all of this necessary? Because pensioners, doctors and teachers are practically starving while the thieves in power buy ever more villas, yachts, and the devil knows what else.’ Nor does Navalny shy away from sharp visual imagery. Another one of his projects is to collect photographs of potholes, crumbling motorways, cracking bridges and other road catastrophes waiting to happen. On his personal blog, where he posts running commentary on the nefarious activities of Russia’s most famous corporations and covers the protest activities of himself and his supporters (demonstrations, lawsuits, prison), Navalny uses a particularly arresting photograph on the top left corner of every page.

Russia’s new dissidents

Thursday

22 Dec 2011
Anne Applebaum

Anne Applebaum’s books of the year

Snowdrops, A. D. Miller’s literary thriller, has to qualify as the book I was ‘most unable to put down’ this year. It’s set in a contemporary Moscow which I instantly recognised — glamorous, vicious, amoral and terrifying all at once. Miller puts his finger right on what makes modern Russia so compelling to outsiders. When his main character, a bland Englishman, allows himself to be enticed into a scam involving beautiful girls, phony building permits, and enormous amounts of money we intuitively understand why. For those who prefer their scams closer to home, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, Michael Lewis’s book on the 2008 sub-prime mortgage crash is a brilliant read, and highly educational.

Saturday

3 Sep 2011
Anne Applebaum

Is Nato finished?

After Muammar Gaddafi and his ghastly children fled Tripoli, Libyans desecrated his statues and stamped on his posters. As it turned out, the Libyans really did hate Gaddafi enough to rise up, arm themselves and overthrow him. Gaddafi’s own elite units mostly melted away when the rebels advanced into Tripoli, and even the dictator’s tatty palaces (where did all that oil money go, one wonders) were abandoned by his personal guard. Backed by western airpower and special forces, the rebels entered many of these ramshackle structures unopposed. The Libyans have a right to be proud, and we in the West have a right to feel relieved. This wasn’t Suez, in the end, and the most dire predictions have so far failed to come true.

Saturday

23 Jul 2011
Anne Applebaum

High noon

The American left is revelling in Rupert Murdoch’s British troubles – and it’s America that has the power to really hurt him Washington DC Let’s start, first, with the bare facts: a British newspaper has been found to have broken British law. The proprietor has closed the paper and apologised profusely. Some British policemen have resigned. Some British journalists have been arrested. While all of this is happening, wars are being fought in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan. The baseball season is progressing. Goldman Sachs has reported a disappointing $1 billion profit. The US Congress is wrangling over the national debt and, as a result, the American government may be about to default. And yet the story we all want to talk about here in Washington this week is the story of the British paper breaking British law.

Saturday

26 Mar 2011
Anne Applebaum

The new alliance

‘Freedom fries,’ served instead of French fries back in 2003, are no longer on the menu in Washington DC. French wine, out of fashion after Jacques Chirac refused to join our ‘coalition of the willing’ in Iraq, is no longer shunned. Au contraire. In one Washington restaurant last Saturday night, someone at my table raised a toast to the new leaders of the free world: ‘Vive la France!’ What else could we do? Our president was on his way to Brazil. Over in Old Europe, the President of France and his new best friend, the British Prime Minister, had just put themselves in charge of a new ‘coalition of the willing’ in Libya.As I write, the ultimate goals and even the composition of this brand-new, ad hoc international grouping are still unclear.

The new alliance

Saturday

11 Dec 2010
Anne Applebaum

The sensational truth

For a man who earns his living by publishing other people’s email, Julian Assange has a high opinion of himself. You can hear that in his rhetoric, which combines the paranoia of the early Bolsheviks with the arrogance of a teenage computer hacker. When a subordinate dared threaten him a few months ago, Assange slapped him down by declaring himself ‘the heart and soul of this organisation, its founder, philosopher, spokesperson, original coder, organiser, financier, and all the rest’. When others threatened to leave, he declared, in the manner of the young Lenin, that the organisation was in ‘a Unity or Death situation’. His goals are as vast as his self-esteem: chief among them is the destruction of the American government as we know it.

The sensational truth

Saturday

30 Oct 2010
Anne Applebaum

A far-fetched war

First, a disclaimer: this review will not touch upon some recent, odd behaviour of this book’s author, Orlando Figes, because I can’t see that it’s relevant.First, a disclaimer: this review will not touch upon some recent, odd behaviour of this book’s author, Orlando Figes, because I can’t see that it’s relevant. The history of the Crimean war is far removed in time and in space from contemporary literary politics, and I think we should keep it that way. Second, an unexpected fact. Although the Crimean war is also far removed in time and space from contemporary American politics, while reading this excellent book I could not help but marvel at the many parallels with the present. Figes’s goal, in writing about the Crimean war, was to take the subject away from the military historians who have ‘constantly retold the same stories (the Charge of the Light Brigade, the bungling of the English commanders, Florence Nightingale)’ and to put it back into its political context.

A far-fetched war

Saturday

17 Jul 2010

Saturday

15 May 2010
Anne Applebaum

Paranoia and empty promises

It has taken more than half a century, but at last the Anglophone world has woken up to the fact that 20th-century communist history makes a superb backdrop for fiction. So extreme and dramatic were the Russian revolution, the arrests and the purges, Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union and the imposition of Stalinism on the eastern half of Europe that all you have to do is write down what really happened and it sounds like fiction anyway. English historians such as Catherine Merridale (Night of Stone) and Simon Sebag-Montefiore (The Court of the Red Tsar) have known this for a while now. Now English novelists, from Martin Amis to Sebag-Montefiore himself, are finally catching up. The Betrayal is Helen Dunmore’s most recent contribution to this general awakening.

Paranoia and empty promises

Saturday

24 Apr 2010
Anne Applebaum

Ghosts from the Soviet past

Above all, it is the inhuman scale of things which impresses the visitor to Moscow: the vastness of Red Square, the width of the uncrossable streets, the implacability of the traffic. The city’s history seems equally inhuman, haunted as it is by centuries of tyrants, millions of political prisoners, countless wars. Impossible to navigate and impossible to know, Moscow doesn’t exactly embrace the casual tourist. But Rachel Polonsky was not a casual tourist. A scholar of Russian literature who lived in Moscow for a decade, she knew better than to start looking for the essence of the city in Red Square. Instead, she began on a single street, inside a single flat. The street was her own: Romanov Lane. The flat was inhabited by her upstairs neighbour, an expat banker with a Texas drawl.

Ghosts from the Soviet past

Saturday

17 Apr 2010
Anne Applebaum

A flicker of light in a dark Russian forest

Anne Applebaum says the catastrophic plane crash near Smolensk, which killed so many of Poland’s leading figures, may hasten a rapprochement between Warsaw and MoscowThe President, the First Lady, the chairman of the National Bank. Fifteen members of parliament. Ten generals. Anna Walentynowicz, 80-year-old heroine of the Solidarity strike of 1980. Ryszard Kaczorowski, the 91-year-old former president-in-exile. The list of Polish dignitaries who died in the tragic plane crash in the forest near Smolensk, Russia, not far from where 20,000 Polish officers were secretly murdered by Stalin 70 years ago, is extraordinarily long. Yet this time around, nobody suspects a Russian conspiracy. Or almost nobody: a handful of fringe websites and cranky newspapers have of course discovered one, and there is still plenty of time for the odd politician to join them.

Wednesday

4 Nov 2009
Anne Applebaum

Skeletons in the cupboard

Freudian analysis, Soviet communism and the garment industry: what do all of these things have in common? If your answer has something to do with central and east European Jews born at the end of the 19th century, you wouldn’t be far off.Freudian analysis, Soviet communism and the garment industry: what do all of these things have in common? If your answer has something to do with central and east European Jews born at the end of the 19th century, you wouldn’t be far off. That generation formed an important part of the intellectual and mercantile elite of Europe, but not the political elite — which is partly why some of them wound up in the radical communist anti-elite instead. In some families, various members dabbled in all of these worlds.

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