CANR

• Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism Doubleday (New York, NY), 2020
• Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World Doubleday (New York, NY), 2024

1. Autocracy, Inc. : the dictators who want to run the world LCCN 2024011002 Type of material Book Personal name Applebaum, Anne, 1964- author. Main title Autocracy, Inc. : the dictators who want to run the world / Anne Applebaum. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Doubleday, [2024] Projected pub date 2409 Description pages cm ISBN 9780385549936 (hardcover) (ebook) Item not available at the Library. Why not? 2. Twilight of democracy : the seductive lure of authoritarianism LCCN 2020012450 Type of material Book Personal name Applebaum, Anne, 1964- author. Main title Twilight of democracy : the seductive lure of authoritarianism / Anne Applebaum. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Doubleday, [2020] Description 207 pages ; 20 cm ISBN 9780385545808 (hardcover) 9781984899507 (paperback) (ebook) CALL NUMBER JC480 .A67 2020 FT MEADE Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• The Atlantic - https://www.theatlantic.com/author/anne-applebaum/

  Anne Applebaum
  Anne Applebaum is a staff writer at The Atlantic. She is also a senior fellow at the Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, where she co-leads a project on 21st-century disinformation. Her books include Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine; Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944–1956; and Gulag: A History, which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Her most recent books include the New York Times best seller Twilight of Democracy, an essay on democracy and authoritarianism, and Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. She was a Washington Post columnist for 15 years and a member of the editorial board. She has also been the deputy editor of The Spectator and a columnist for several British newspapers. Her writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy, among many other publications.

• Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies website - https://sais.jhu.edu/users/aappleb3

  Anne Applebaum
  SAIS Senior Fellow of International Affairs

  Senior Fellow at the SNF Agora Institute

  aappleb3@jhu.edu
  Campus Location: Washington DC
  @anneapplebaum
  Personal Website
  About
  Biography
  Research & Publications
  CV
  Anne Applebaum is a staff writer for The Atlantic and a Pulitzer-prize winning historian. She is also a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where she co-directs Arena, a program on disinformation and 21st century propaganda.

  A Washington Post columnist for 15 years and a former member of the editorial board, she has also worked as the foreign and deputy editor of the Spectator magazine in London, as the political editor of the Evening Standard, and as a columnist at Slate and at several British newspapers, including the Daily and Sunday Telegraphs. From 1988-1991 she covered the collapse of communism as the Warsaw correspondent of the Economist magazine and the Independent newspaper.

  Her newest book, The Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, explains why some of her contemporaries have abandoned liberal democratic ideals in favor of strongman cults, nationalist movements, or one-party states.

  Her previous books include Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956, and Gulag: A History. Both Iron Curtain and Gulag: A History have appeared in more than two dozen translations, including all major European languages. Both books were National Book Award finalists.

  Applebaum is also the co-author of a cookbook, From a Polish Country House Kitchen, and a recently re-published her travelogue, Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe, which describes a journey across Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine made just before the break-up of the Soviet Union.

  Over the years, her writing has also appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Financial Times, the International Herald Tribune, Foreign Affairs, The New Criterion, The Weekly Standard, the New Republic, The National Review, The New Statesman, The Independent, The Guardian, Prospect, Commentaire, Die Welt, Cicero, Gazeta Wyborcza and The Times Literary Supplement, as well as in several anthologies.

  She has also lectured at Yale, Harvard, and Columbia Universities, as well as Oxford, Cambridge, London, Belfast, Heidelberg, Maastricht, Zurich, Humboldt, Texas A&M, Houston, and many others. In 2012–13 she held the Phillipe Roman Chair of History and International Relations at the London School of Economics.

  Anne Applebaum was born in Washington, D.C., in 1964. After graduating from Yale University, she was a Marshall Scholar at the LSE and St. Antony’s College, Oxford. Her husband, Radoslaw Sikorski, is a Polish politician and writer. They have two children, Alexander and Tadeusz.

  Expertise
  Links
  Regulate social media now.
  Anne Applebaum joins SNF Agora Institute.

• Washington Post - https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/anne-applebaum/

  Anne Applebaum
  London and Warsaw
  Former columnist focusing on national politics and foreign policy
  Education: Yale University, BA in history and literature; London School of Economics, MSc in international relations; Georgetown University, Doctor honoris causa​

  Anne Applebaum is a columnist for The Washington Post and a prize-winning historian with a particular expertise in the history of communist and post-communist Europe. She is also a professor of practice at the London School of Economics, where she runs ARENA, a research project on disinformation and 21st-century propaganda. She is the author of several books, including "Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine," "Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe" and "Gulag: A History," which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. Both "Gulag" and "Iron Curtain" were nominated for the National Book Award. Applebaum, who left The Post in 2019, is a former member of The Washington Post's editorial board, a former deputy editor of the Spectator magazine, and a former Warsaw correspondent of the Economist. She has lectured at many universities, including Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Oxford, Cambridge, Zurich and Humboldt. She writes regularly for the New York Review of Books, Foreign Affairs and many other publications.
  Honors and Awards: Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction, 2004; Cundill History Prize, 2013; Lionel Gelber Prize, 2018
  Languages spoken in addition to English: Polish, Russian, French

  Books by Anne Applebaum:

  Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

  Buy this book
  Gulag: A History

  Buy this book
  Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956

  Buy this book
  Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe

• Wikipedia -

  Anne Applebaum

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  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Anne Applebaum

  Applebaum in 2013
  Born Anne Elizabeth Applebaum
  July 25, 1964 (age 60)[1]
  Washington, D.C., U.S.
  Citizenship
  United StatesPolish
  Education
  Yale University (BA)
  London School of Economics (MSc)
  St Antony's College, Oxford
  Known for Writing on Soviet Union and its satellite countries
  Spouse Radosław Sikorski ​(m. 1992)​
  Children 2
  Awards Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction
  Website www.anneapplebaum.com Edit this at Wikidata
  Anne Elizabeth Applebaum[2][3] (born July 25, 1964) is an American journalist and historian. She has written extensively about the history of Communism and the development of civil society in Central and Eastern Europe. Applebaum also holds Polish citizenship.

  She has worked at The Economist and The Spectator,[4] and was a member of the editorial board of The Washington Post (2002–2006).[5] Applebaum won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 2004 for Gulag: A History published the previous year.[6] She is a staff writer for The Atlantic[7] and a senior fellow at The Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.[8]

  Early life and education
  Applebaum was born in Washington, D.C. to a reform Jewish family, the eldest of three daughters of Harvey M. and Elizabeth Applebaum.[2][9] Her father, a Yale alumnus, is senior counsel at Covington & Burling's Antitrust and International Trade Practices. Her mother was a program coordinator at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. According to Applebaum, her great-grandparents immigrated to America during the reign of Alexander III of Russia from what is now Belarus.[10]

  After attending the Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C., Applebaum entered Yale University, where during the Fall 1982 semester she studied Soviet history under Wolfgang Leonhard.[11] As an undergraduate, she spent the summer of 1985 in Leningrad, Soviet Union (now Saint Petersburg, Russia), an experience she credits with helping shape her opinions.[12]

  Applebaum received her BA from Yale in 1986 summa cum laude in history and literature,[13][11] and was the recipient of a two-year Marshall Scholarship at the London School of Economics, where she earned a master's degree in international relations (1987).[14] She also studied at St Antony's College, Oxford, before becoming a correspondent for The Economist and moving to Warsaw, Poland, in 1988.[15]

  In November 1989, Applebaum drove from Warsaw to Berlin to report on the collapse of the Berlin Wall.[16]

  Career
  As foreign correspondent for The Economist and The Independent, she covered the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of communism. In 1991 she moved back to England to work for The Economist, and was later hired as the foreign and later deputy editor of The Spectator, and later the political editor of the Evening Standard.[17]

  In 1994, she published her first book Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe, a travelogue that described the rise of nationalism across the new states of the former Soviet Union.[18] In 2001, she interviewed prime minister Tony Blair.[19] She also undertook historical research for her book Gulag: A History (2003) on the Soviet prison camp system, which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.[6][20][21] It was also nominated for a National Book Award, for the Los Angeles Times book award and for the National Book Critics Circle Award.[22]

  External videos
  video icon Booknotes interview with Applebaum on Gulag, May 25, 2003, C-SPAN
  video icon Q&A interview with Applebaum on Iron Curtain, December 16, 2012, C-SPAN
  She has been a member of The Washington Post editorial board.[5] She was a columnist at The Washington Post for seventeen years.[23] Applebaum was an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.[24]

  Her second history book, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944–56, was published in 2012 by Doubleday in the US and Allen Lane in the UK; it was nominated for a National Book Award, shortlisted for the 2013 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award.[25]

  From 2011 to 2016, she created and ran the Transitions Forum at the Legatum Institute, an international think tank and educational charity based in London. Among other projects, she ran a two-year program examining the relationship between democracy and growth in Brazil, India and South Africa,[26] created the Future of Syria[27] and Future of Iran projects[28] on future institutional change in those two countries, and commissioned a series of papers on corruption in Georgia,[29] Moldova[30] and Ukraine.[31]

  Together with Foreign Policy magazine she created Democracy Lab, a website focusing on countries in transition to, or away from, democracy[32] and which has since become Democracy Post[33] at The Washington Post. She also ran Beyond Propaganda,[34] a program examining 21st century propaganda and disinformation. Started in 2014, the program anticipated later debates about "fake news". In 2016, she left Legatum because of its stance on Brexit following the appointment of Euroskeptic Philippa Stroud as CEO[35] and joined the London School of Economics as a Professor of Practice at the Institute for Global Affairs. At the LSE, she ran Arena, a program on disinformation and 21st century propaganda.[36] In the autumn of 2019 she moved the project to the Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University.[8]

  In October 2017, she published her third history book, Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine, a history of the Holodomor. The book won the Lionel Gelber Prize[37] and the Duff Cooper Prize,[38] making her the only author to ever win the Duff Cooper Prize twice.[39]

  In November 2019, The Atlantic announced that Applebaum was joining the publication as a staff writer starting in January 2020.[23] She was included in the 2020 Prospect list of the top-50 thinkers for the COVID-19 era.[40]

  External videos
  video icon Presentation by Applebaum on Twilight of Democracy, July 21, 2020, C-SPAN
  In July 2020, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism was published. Partly a memoir and partly political analysis, it was a Der Spiegel[41] and New York Times bestseller.[42]

  Also in July 2020, Applebaum was one of the 153 signers of the "Harper's Letter" (also known as "A Letter on Justice and Open Debate") that expressed concern that "the free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted."[43]

  In November 2022, Applebaum was one of 200 US citizens sanctioned by Russia for "promotion of the Russophobic campaign and support for the regime in Kyiv."[44]

  Applebaum is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.[45] She is on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy and Renew Democracy Initiative.[46][47] She was a member of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting's international board of directors.[48] She was a Senior Adjunct Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) where she co-led a major initiative aimed at countering Russian disinformation in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE).[49] She was on the editorial board for The American Interest[50] and the Journal of Democracy.[51][when?]

  Positions

  This section relies excessively on references to primary sources. Please improve this section by adding secondary or tertiary sources.
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  Soviet Union and Russia
  According to Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Applebaum has been active as a political commentator highly critical of Russia and Putin’s regime."[52] Ivan Krastev asserts that the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall "was the point of departure of everything that Applebaum did in the following three decades...For her, the end of the Cold War was not a geopolitical story; it was a moral story, a verdict pronounced by history itself."[53]

  Applebaum has been writing about the Soviet Union and Russia since the early 1990s. In 2000, she described the links between the then-new president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, with the former Soviet leader Yuri Andropov and the former KGB.[54] In 2008, she began speaking about "Putinism" as an anti-democratic ideology, though most at the time still considered the Russian president to be a pro-Western pragmatist.[55]

  Applebaum has been a vocal critic of Western conduct regarding the Russian military intervention in Ukraine. In an article in The Washington Post on March 5, 2014, she maintained that the US and its allies should not continue to enable "the existence of a corrupt Russian regime that is destabilizing Europe", noting that the actions of President Vladimir Putin had violated "a series of international treaties".[56] On March 7, in another article on The Daily Telegraph, discussing an information war, Applebaum argued that "a robust campaign to tell the truth about Crimea is needed to counter Moscow's lies".[57] At the end of August, she asked whether Ukraine should prepare for "total war" with Russia and whether central Europeans should join them.[58]

  In 2014, writing in The New York Review of Books she asked (in a review of Karen Dawisha's Putin's Kleptocracy) whether "the most important story of the past twenty years might not, in fact, have been the failure of democracy, but the rise of a new form of Russian authoritarianism".[59] She has described the "myth of Russian humiliation" and argued that NATO and EU expansion have been a "phenomenal success".[60] In July 2016, before the US election, she wrote about connections between Donald Trump and Russia[61] and wrote that Russian support for Trump was part of a wider Russian political campaign designed to destabilize the West.[62] In December 2019, she wrote in The Atlantic that "in the 21st century, we must also contend with a new phenomenon: right-wing intellectuals, now deeply critical of their own societies, who have begun paying court to right-wing dictators who dislike America."[63]

  Central Europe
  Applebaum has written about the history of central and eastern Europe, Poland in particular. In the conclusion to her book Iron Curtain, Applebaum argued that the reconstruction of civil society was the most important and most difficult challenge for the post-communist states of central Europe; in another essay, she argued that the modern authoritarian obsession with civil society repression dates back to Vladimir Lenin.[64] She has written essays on the Polish film-maker Andrzej Wajda,[65] on the dual Nazi–Soviet occupation of central Europe,[66] and on why it is inaccurate to define "Eastern Europe" as a single entity.[67]

  Disinformation, propaganda and fake news
  In 2014, Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev launched Beyond Propaganda, a program examining disinformation and propaganda, at the Legatum Institute.[68] Applebaum wrote about a 2014 Russian smear campaign aimed at her when she was writing heavily about the Russian annexation of Crimea. She stated that dubious material posted on the web was eventually recycled by semi-respectable American pro-Russian websites.[69] Applebaum argued in 2015 that Facebook should take responsibility for spreading false stories and help "undo the terrible damage done by Facebook and other forms of social media to democratic debate and civilized discussion all over the world".[70] Applebaum has been a member of the advisory panel of the Global Disinformation Index.[71]

  Nationalism
  In March 2016, eight months before the election of President Donald Trump, Applebaum wrote a Washington Post column asking, "Is this the end of the West as we know it?", which argued that "we are two or three bad elections away from the end of NATO, the end of the European Union and maybe the end of the liberal world order".[72] Applebaum endorsed Hillary Clinton's campaign for president in July 2016 on the grounds that Trump is "a man who appears bent on destroying the alliances that preserve international peace and American power".[73]

  Applebaum's March 2016 Washington Post column prompted the Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger and the German magazine Der Spiegel to interview her. The articles appeared in December 2016[74][75] and January 2017. She argued very early on that the international populist movement which had frequently been identified as "far right" or "alt right" were in truth not conservative in nature in a way that the term "conservative" had long been defined. She wrote that populist groups in Europe share "ideas and ideology, friends and founders", and that, unlike Burkean conservatives, they seek to "overthrow the institutions of the present to bring back things that existed in the past—or that they believe existed in the past—by force."[76] Applebaum has underlined the danger of a new "Nationalist International", a union of xenophobic, nationalist parties such as Law and Justice in Poland, the Northern League in Italy, and the Freedom Party in Austria.[77]

  In January 2022, Applebaum was invited to testify before the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee hearing entitled "Bolstering Democracy in the Age of Rising Authoritarianism".[78]

  Israel
  In January 2002, Applebaum wrote a Slate opinion piece "Kill the Messenger" criticizing Israeli attacks on Palestinian Authority targets as ineffective and harmful, arguing instead for a focus on the Palestinian Authority's radio and TV studios which she believes perpetuate anti-American sentiment and support for terrorism, thereby worsening the conflict.[79]

  Applebaum has critiqued Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's judicial overhaul and its impact on Israeli society. She argues that Netanyahu's efforts to change the judiciary have created deep divisions within Israel, which have implications for national security. This internal discord, she suggests, might have emboldened groups like Hamas to launch attacks, perceiving Israel as weakened by its internal strife[80]

  Personal life
  In 1992, Applebaum married Radosław Sikorski, who later served as Poland's Defence Minister, Foreign Minister, Marshal of the Sejm, and a member of the European Parliament. Since 2023, he serves again as Minister of Foreign Affairs. The couple have two sons, Aleksander and Tadeusz.[81] She became a Polish citizen in 2013.[82] She speaks Polish and Russian in addition to English.[83]

  Awards and honors
  1992 Charles Douglas-Home Memorial Trust Award
  2003 National Book Award Nonfiction, finalist, Gulag: A History[84]
  2003 Duff Cooper Prize for Gulag: A History
  2004 Pulitzer Prize (General Non-Fiction), Gulag: A History[85]
  2008 Estonian Order of the Cross of Terra Mariana third class
  2008 Lithuanian Millenium Star[86]
  2010 Petőfi Prize
  2012 Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland[87]
  2012 National Book Award (Nonfiction), finalist, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944–1956[88]
  2013 Cundill Prize in Historical Literature, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944–1956[89]
  2013 Duke of Westminster's Medal for Military Literature, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944–1956[90]
  2017 Doctor of Humane Letters Honoris Causa, Georgetown University[91]
  2017 Honorary Doctorate, National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy[92]
  2017 Duff Cooper Prize for her book Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine
  2017 Antonovych Prize[93]
  2018 Lionel Gelber Prize for her book Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine[94]
  2018 Honorary Fritz Stern Professor, University of Wrocław[95]
  2019 Premio Nonino "Maestro del nostro tempo" ("Master of our Time")[96]
  2019 Order of Princess Olga, third class[97]
  2021 National Magazine Awards finalist in categories "Essays and Criticism" and "Columns and Commentary"[98]
  2021 Premio Internacional de Periodismo de EL MUNDO[99]
  2022 Order of Princess Olga, second class[100]
  2024 Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels[101]
  Bibliography
  Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe, Pantheon, 1994, reprinted by Random House, 1995; Penguin, 2015; and Anchor, 2017, ISBN 0679421505
  Gulag: A History, Doubleday, 2003, 677 pages, ISBN 0-7679-0056-1; paperback, Bantam Dell, 2004, 736 pages, ISBN 1-4000-3409-4
  Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956, Allen Lane, 2012, 614 pages, ISBN 978-0-713-99868-9 / Doubleday ISBN 978-0-385-51569-6
  Gulag Voices : An Anthology, Yale University Press, 2011, 224 pages, ISBN 9780300177831; hardback
  From a Polish Country House Kitchen, Chronicle Books, 2012, 288 pages, ISBN 1-452-11055-7; hardback
  Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine, Penguin Randomhouse, 2017[102][52]
  Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, Doubleday, 2020, 224 pages, ISBN 978-0385545808; hardback
  Wybór (Choice), Agora, 2021, 320 pages, ISBN 978-8326838255; hardback
  Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, Doubleday, 2024, 224 pages, ISBN 978-0385549936; hardback

QUOTED: "Today's ideologically charged conflict between Kiev and Moscow often reduces history to the cannon fodder of propaganda. That makes Applebaum's meticulous study ... so important. ... Applebaum has drawn back the veil--with the same force, clarity and readability as in her earlier books on the Gulag and on the Soviet postwar conquest of Eastern Europe--on one of the 20th century's most egregious crimes."

Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

Allen Lane, 25 [pounds sterling], pp. 496

In 1933 my aunt Lenina Bibikova was eight years old. She lived in Kharkov, Ukraine. Every morning a polished black Packard automobile would draw up to the door of the handsome pre-revolutionary mansion her family shared with other senior Party cadres to take her father to his job as Party boss at the Kharkov Tractor Factory. When he returned in the evening her father would be carrying bulging packets of sausages and meat from the factory canteen. Lenina did not remember wanting for anything.

Yet in reality Kharkov, like all Ukraine's cities in that terrible year, was an island of plenty in a sea of starvation. All over Ukraine millions of peasants were dying of hunger in a massive, man-made famine deliberately unleashed by the Soviet state. As Anne Applebaum chronicles in her wrenching, vivid and brilliant account of the Holodomor--literally, the 'hunger-death' --famine had become the main weapon of a war unleashed by Stalin on both the reactionary peasant class and on Ukrainian national identity itself.

During the famine years those peasants who managed to crawl to Ukraine's cities, bellies bloated from hunger, were rounded up by special trucks that patrolled at night on secret orders from the municipal authorities to pick up the living and the dead. By morning there was no trace, for those who chose not to see, of the horror which was unfolding all around.

That wilful blindness has continued ever since. For Ukrainian nationalists, the Holodomor was a genocide unleashed against their people that is today commemorated in a day of national mourning akin to Holocaust memorial day in Israel. For the Soviet authorities--and now, disgustingly, Putin's tame historians--the great famines of the early 1930s were nothing more than a natural disaster.

As Applebaum shows, drawing on a wealth of witness accounts and Soviet archival sources, there was little natural about it. From the earliest days of the Revolution, she writes, 'the link between food and power was something that the Bolsheviks also understood very well ... constant shortages made food supplies a hugely significant political tool. Whoever had bread had followers, soldiers, loyal friends.' As early as 1921 Maksim Litvinov--later Soviet foreign minister--told a group of visiting American aid workers coming to help the starving of the Volga, in his precise but accented English, 'Yes, but food is a veppon ...'

It took Stalin's ruthless genius to fully weaponise hunger as a tool of total war against the enemies--real or imagined --of the Soviet regime. The first Five Year Plan of 1928 called for peasants' private land to be confiscated and all herds and grain to be turned over to the new collective farms. All over the Soviet Union, peasants slaughtered their livestock and gorged themselves rather than give them up to the Soviet state. Eyewitnesses from the Red Cross reported seeing peasants 'drunk on food', their eyes stupefied by their mad, self-destructive gluttony, and the knowledge of its consequences. Harvests from the new collective farms fell disastrously. By the summer of 1932, it was clear that Ukraine --for centuries the grain-basket of the Russian empire thanks to its fertile black earth and twice-yearly harvests of winter barley and summer wheat--had catastrophically failed to meet the production quotas set by the Kremlin. Stalin reverted to what he knew best from his days as a bank-robber in Tbilisi--violence, and theft. Requisition gangs were sent to seize grain reserves, seed reserves, animal fodder and, ominously, daily food supplies.

The unfulfilled portion of the Plan had to be 'fulfilled unconditionally, completely, not lowering it by an ounce', Stalin's lieutenant Vyacheslav Molotov told the Ukrainian authorities in October 1932. Already, the secret police had rounded up wealthy peasants who had resisted collectivisation and shipped them to newly built gulags in their tens of thousands--the guards dubbed the trainloads of humanity 'white coal'. Now, the Soviet authorities unleashed something very close to a war on their own Ukrainian citizens. 'During the Revolution I saw things that I would not want even my enemies to see,' wrote the Politburo member Nikolai Bukharin. 'Yet in 1919 we were fighting for our lives ... but in 1930-33 we were conducting a mass annihilation of completely defenceless men together with their wives and children.'

On 1 January 1933 Stalin demanded that the Party use a recent law on 'theft of state property' to prosecute collective and individual farmers in Ukraine who were allegedly hiding grain. That telegram is probably the closest thing we have to a direct command from the Kremlin ordering the Holodomor. Stalin's cable, writes Applebaum, 'was a signal to begin mass searches and persecutions ... in practice that telegram forced Ukrainian peasants to make a fatal choice. They could give up their grain reserves and die of starvation, or they could keep some grain reserves hidden and risk arrest, execution or the confiscation of the rest of their food--after which they would also die of starvation.'

The result was 'such inhuman, unimaginable misery, such a terrible disaster, that it began to seem almost abstract, it would not fit within the bounds of consciousness', wrote Boris Pasternak after a trip to Ukraine. The young Hungarian communist Arthur Koestler found the 'enormous land wrapped in silence'. The British socialist Malcolm Muggeridge took a train to Kiev, where he found the rural population starving. Embittered, the idealistic Muggeridge left the Soviet Union, convinced he had witnessed 'one of the most monstrous crimes in history, so terrible that people in the future will scarcely be able to believe it ever happened'.

The enduring tragedy of the Holodomor --which left at least five million dead, including almost four million Ukrainians --is that Muggeridge was right. Plenty of modern Russians still don't believe it ever happened. Since Ukraine's independence --and even more so since the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the ensuing Russian-backed separatist war in Donbass--the Holodomor has become an ideological touchstone, as vehemently denied by the Kremlin as it is promoted by nationalist Ukrainians.

Applebaum resists the passions of that raging ideological battle and sticks to the relentless, horrifying facts, unequivocally documented in the Soviet secret police reports, eyewitness accounts and the correspondence of senior Party leaders. She squarely places the Holodomor in the wider context of the Soviet regime's battle with Ukrainian identity itself (an imperial crusade against separatism inherited from the Tsars). 'Famine was only half the story,' she writes. 'While peasants were dying in the countryside, the Soviet secret police simultaneously launched an attack on the Ukrainian intellectual and political elites. As the famine spread, a campaign of slander and repression was launched against Ukrainian intellectuals, professors, museum curators, writers, artists, priests, theologians, public officials and bureaucrats.' The archives show that Stalin's aim was demonstrably not just to exterminate the reactionary peasantry but to squash all memory of the independent Ukrainian state that had flickered briefly in the aftermath of the first world war.

Perhaps most controversial is the debate over whether the Holodomor was, in fact, a genocide. Some commentators have accused Applebaum of shying away from that loaded word--though in fact she is perfectly clear that the debate is a purely semantic one. Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer who invented the word 'genocide', spoke of the Holodomor as the 'classic example' of his concept: 'It is a case of genocide, of destruction, not of individuals only, but of a culture and a nation.' The controversy stems, as Applebaum explains in a carefully written epilogue, from the later, more legalistic definition of 'genocide' as set down by the United Nations in 1948. The Soviet delegation to the first UN General Assembly had argued that political persecution was 'entirely out of place in a scientific definition of genocide', and successfully lobbied that the official definition be restricted to the annihilation of entire ethnic groups. 'Genocide' thereafter became 'organically bound up with fascismnazism and other similar race theories', Applebaum writes. 'The Holodomor does not meet that criterion. The Ukrainian famine was not an attempt to eliminate every single living Ukrainian; it was also halted, in the summer of 1933, well before it could devastate the entire nation.'

Applebaum's summary of the reality of the genocide debate says more about Moscow's successful--and cynical--manipulation of international discourse than it does about the events of 1930-34 in Ukraine. But it will also anger Ukrainian nationalists who see the Holodomor--as they see today's conflict in Donbass--as a species of epic blood feud between the two Slavic nations. They are wrong. Both conflicts are about the Kremlin's imperial programme of power and control rather than blind ethnic hatred.

Today's ideologically charged conflict between Kiev and Moscow often reduces history to the cannon fodder of propaganda. That makes Applebaum's meticulous study --the first since Robert Conquest's excellent but inevitably poorly sourced The Harvest of Sorrow (1986)--so important. The Soviet state successfully concealed the reality of the Holodomor even from children like Lenina Bibikova who were growing up in its midst--then spent 70 years denying its crimes. Applebaum has drawn back the veil--with the same force, clarity and readability as in her earlier books on the Gulag and on the Soviet postwar conquest of Eastern Europe--on one of the 20th century's most egregious crimes.

Caption: Mykola Bokan's photograph of his family, including a memorial to 'Kostya, who died of hunger', July 1933. Bokan and his son were arrested for documenting the famine--both died in the gulag

Caption: Bob Marley and the Wailers at the Crystal Palace Bowl, 7 June 1980

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
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Matthews, Owen. "The hunger." Spectator, vol. 335, no. 9865, 23 Sept. 2017, pp. 30+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A524611555/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=891f4b06. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024.

QUOTED: "a richly detailed history."

RED FAMINE Stalin's War on Ukraine By Anne Applebaum 461 pp. Doubleday. $35.

The Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum has long lived in and written about Eastern Europe and is best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning ''Gulag: A History.'' But my favorite of her books is the quirky and original 1994 ''Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe,'' in which she travels from the Baltic to the Black Sea, entirely through regions and cities that had found themselves situated, over the course of the 20th century, in several different countries. Today's Lviv, for example, in western Ukraine, was previously Lvov in the Soviet Union, and before that Lwow in interwar Poland, and prior to 1914 was Lemberg in Austria-Hungary. And that's not even counting its occupation by czarist Russia in World War I, Nazi Germany in World War II and a short-lived Ukrainian nationalist group in 1918.

Most of the people she spoke to on that journey shared a sense of ethnic identity under threat by a nation in which they were now absorbed, or had been oppressed by in the past. They felt themselves to be unfairly Lithuanianized Poles, or Belarusified Lithuanians or Ruthenians denied a country when everyone else seemed to be getting their own. The book was prescient, for it is exactly that sense of aggrieved, wounded ethnic or national pride that has been cultivated so skillfully by politicians who have emerged in recent years, from Viktor Orban in Budapest to Vladimir Putin in Moscow to Donald Trump in Washington.

The specter of clashing nationalisms also runs through Applebaum's new book, ''Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine,'' a richly detailed history of the great famine, peaking in 1933, which killed an estimated five million or more Soviets, more than 3.9 million of them Ukrainian. Stalin, beginning several years earlier, had ruthlessly forced millions of independent small farmers into the new collective farms that he was certain would increase production and feed Soviet cities. The farmers understandably resisted giving up their land, often slaughtered and ate the animals they were ordered to bring with them, and had little incentive to work once they were taken, sometimes at gunpoint, to the collectives.

This is certainly part of the story, but Applebaum puts more emphasis on something that has great relevance for today: Russia's prolonged fear of losing a territory it had long treated as a lucrative colony. Even Alexander II, the reformer czar who freed the serfs, outlawed Ukrainian books and magazines and forbade the use of the language in theaters and opera. Schoolchildren generally had to be educated in Russian even when, despite the many ethnic Russians in Ukrainian cities, in the countryside most people spoke Ukrainian.

In the chaos of dissolving empires toward the end of World War I, Ukraine declared itself independent, but its famously fertile black earth and Black Sea ports were tempting prizes for rival independence movements, for both White Russians and Bolsheviks, and for the territory's neighbors. After several extremely bloody years of fighting (Kiev changed hands more than a dozen times in 1919), Ukraine was divided between two newborn states: Poland and -- taking the lion's share -- the Soviet Union.

Even before the disastrous imposition of collective farming, Russia's new rulers ''once again followed the precedent set by the czars,'' Applebaum writes; ''they banned Ukrainian newspapers, stopped the use of Ukrainian in schools and shut down Ukrainian theaters.'' By the mid-1920s, once Soviet power had been firmly established, the regime tried a new policy, as it did in other non-Russian parts of the Soviet Union, giving official status to the Ukrainian language and allowing the production of a definitive Ukrainian-Russian dictionary.

But rather than making the Ukrainians into happy Soviets, this period of limited tolerance only produced more demands for Ukrainian-language schools for the nearly eight million ethnic Ukrainians living in Russia itself, and for Ukrainian border expansions to include some of those ethnic communities. An alarmed Kremlin quickly reversed course.

The end of the 1920s saw a crackdown on the Ukrainian branch of the Orthodox Church and arrests of tens of thousands of Ukrainian teachers and intellectuals -- 45 of whom were the subject of a show trial at the Kharkiv Opera House. Thousands of Ukrainian books were removed from schools and libraries. The dictionary project was now judged subversive, and many of those who worked on it were arrested and shot. Ukrainian-language newspapers and magazines were given lists of words not to be used, and replacements closer to Russian. One letter was even removed from Ukrainian Cyrillic, to make it more like the Russian, as if the very alphabet were guilty of treason and had to be punished.

Then came the senseless scheme of compelling some of the Soviet Union's most productive farmers to abandon their land and move to the untried new collectives. Not only was this imposing an ideological blueprint that didn't work; it was carried out with a cruelty that guaranteed millions of people in the ethnically Ukrainian rural areas would starve. Peasant families were allowed to keep no food for themselves: Teams of Communist Party activists ripped up floorboards and poked through haylofts with iron rods, confiscating all they found, including grain being kept as seed for the next year's crop. Despite the rotting, emaciated corpses of starved adults and children piling up along streets and highways and the wolves that took over abandoned farmhouses, the seizures continued, in part to find grain the state could sell abroad for hard currency. When even loyal party officials raised objections, they were fired, jailed or shot. If resistance to the requisitions and to collectivization was not stamped out, Stalin wrote to Lazar Kaganovich, one of his henchmen, in 1932, ''we may lose Ukraine.''

The planned starvation, the execution of the territory's best artists and intellectuals, the destruction of churches and the crushing of traditional village culture terrified into silence any Ukrainians who wanted autonomy or independence. Then finally, 60 years later, what Stalin had feared happened virtually overnight, and Russia did lose Ukraine. The history of all that happened between these two tragically intertwined peoples in the early 20th century fills in the background to Putin's ruthless desire to gain influence or control over Ukraine once again.

Applebaum has painstakingly mined a vast array of sources, many of which were not available when the historian Robert Conquest wrote his pioneering history of the famine, ''The Harvest of Sorrow,'' 30 years ago: oral histories of survivors; national and local archives in Ukraine, including those of the secret police; and archives in Russia, which opened in the 1990s and then partly closed again, but not before various scholars published collections of documents from them.

One account of the famine comes from the young Welsh journalist Gareth Jones, who walked 40 miles through starvation-ridden districts in 1933 and, after he left the country, wrote one of the very few eyewitness descriptions of the carnage to appear in the Western press. Jones has been celebrated before, but Applebaum also tells the less known story of how, after he spoke out, Stalin's government successfully strong-armed British and American correspondents in Moscow into denying what he said -- even though some of them had been his sources, telling him what would have been censored from their own dispatches. It is a reminder of the lengths that demagogues will go to in order to suppress or distort the truth -- something no less a problem in many a country today than it was in the Soviet Union more than eight decades ago.

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CAPTION(S):

PHOTO: A landowning family on its way to exile. (PHOTOGRAPH FROM ''RED FAMINE'')

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The New York Times Company
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Hochschild, Adam. "Clash of Nationalisms." The New York Times Book Review, 22 Oct. 2017, p. 16(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A510766539/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ec701e19. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024.

QUOTED: "harrowing and brilliant book."

Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

Anne Applebaum

Allen Lane, 512pp. 25[pounds sterling]

"The starvation of a human body, once it begins, always follows the same course," Anne Applebaum explains in this harrowing and brilliant book.

In the first phase, the body consumes its
stores of glucose ... In the second phase,
which can last for several weeks, the
body begins to consume its own fats and
the organism weakens drastically. In the
third phase, the body devours its own
proteins, cannibalising tissues and
muscles. Eventually the skin becomes
thin, the eyes become distended, the legs
and belly swollen ...
The matter-of-fact style Applebaum uses to describe the ghastliest horrors never dulls her compassion or the subtlety of her historical understanding of eastern Europe.

Between 1932 and 1933, around four million people perished in Ukraine in a famine deliberately created by Stalin with the purpose of weakening resistance to collective farming and destroying the sense of national identity. Ukrainians call it the Holodomor--literally "hunger death".

The crime was barbaric even for the 20th century. Compounding the cruelty, the Soviets tried to cover up their actions, right up to the break-up of the USSR six decades later. They falsified census records so that millions of the dead simply disappeared. Two generations were denied the right to mourn the victims.

The Soviets were so successful in hiding the evidence that little was known of the famine until the story was partially revealed by the British historian Robert Conquest in The Harvest of Sorrow, published in 1986.

Applebaum has had the benefit of access to a mass of new material that has become available since Ukraine became independent and some archives were opened in the former Soviet Union. She has used new testimony to produce a book that, like her Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag (2003), mixes deep scholarship with vivid storytelling.

There are many people in Russia--including the ultra-nationalists around Vladimir Putin--who deny the fact of the Ukrainian famine as "fake history". In the Kremlin's efforts to rehabilitate Stalin as a strongman who kept the Russian empire great, official history states that there was starvation but it was a natural disaster sent by God.

Applebaum shows beyond doubt that the famine was man-made and ordered by Stalin for clear political reasons. He wanted to destroy the Ukrainian bourgeoisie, liquidate the kulaks as a class by evicting them from their homes, force the peasantry into submitting to collectivisation and strangle national demands in the semi-autonomous republics--especially in Ukraine.

The Bolsheviks always distrusted the peasantry, which in 1917 formed around 85 per cent of the population in Russia and Ukraine. They believed--rightly--that peasants had a deeply anti-socialist attachment to the land and, in particular, ownership of land. In 1921, the Bolsheviks' disastrous policies of forced grain requisitions and class war in the villages caused mass starvation in the fertile "black earth" region of the northern Caucasus, the Volga basin and Ukraine.

A dozen years later, the countryside was again on the brink of mass starvation. Stalin's drive to form collective farms was failing and was producing less than half the grain ordained by the 1928 "five-year plan". Throughout the spring and summer of 1932, many of Stalin's comrades sent him telegrams begging for help. The most urgent came from Ukraine.

Instead of sending aid, the ruthless magnates in the Kremlin reached decisions they knew would worsen the famine. Red Army soldiers seized the borders and stopped Ukrainians moving elsewhere to find food; they stopped people from villages going to cities, so the starvation was confined to remote countryside areas. Organised groups of Communist Party activists, police and officials from the O GPU (the precursor of the KGB) entered peasant households and took everything edible they could find. They took food from tables and in ovens. They took anything in cupboards, any animals they saw, including pets and even the hedgehogs that were being eaten as hunger set in.

This is not a book for the squeamish. Applebaum records how cannibalism was commonplace. At one point in the spring of 1933, police were investigating ten cases a day of parents mad with hunger killing their own sons and daughters either to feed themselves or their other children.

Starving Ukrainian peasants was one part of Stalin's determination to punish various Ukrainian rebellions during the civil war and to destroy any semblance of a national identity. In cities such as Kyiv, Odessa and Kharkiv, the Soviet secret police began mass arrests of intellectuals. Thousands were shot or sent into the great maw of the Gulag, in a practice run of the Great Terror throughout the USSR a few years later.

The Ukrainian language was banned in schools. Loyal Russian communists were despatched to eastern Ukraine as bureaucrats, and workers from greater Russia were sent to factories around Donetsk and the coal mines of the Donbass, where large numbers of ethnic Russians still live.

The vast majority of Ukrainians have a forebear who died or suffered in the Holodomor. It is a deep wound that invariably opens up when a Russian and a Ukrainian talk of the ghastly passages in their shared history. Nobody should discount the possibility--perhaps probability--that the simmering dispute between Russia and Ukraine will escalate into a dangerous crisis once again. If so, differing historical interpretations of 1932-33 will form the background to the emotional rhetoric on both sides. I would recommend this book for anyone who wants to understand what is happening in Ukraine and Russia today.

Victor Sebesty en s most recent book is "Lenin the Dictator" (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
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Sebestyen, Victor. "Hunger games: Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine." New Statesman, vol. 146, no. 5395, 1 Dec. 2017, p. 39. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A520322412/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b9a24164. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024.

Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine, by Anne Applebaum

(Doubleday, 496 pp., $35)

NEARLY 40 years ago, I met the parents of a graduate-school friend. They were exiles, Ukrainians, a people said not to exist, not really. Their son had told them that I took an unfriendly interest in Soviet history, and that I knew a little about their lost homeland.

The father asked if I'd heard about a famine there in the early 1930s. I had: something to do with collectivization.

"There was more to it than that."

In Red Famine, Anne Applebaum, a prominent journalist and the author of fine histories of the Gulag and the Soviet subjugation of Eastern Europe, recounts just how much more there was. Red Famine is powerfully written, extensively researched, and, frequently, painful reading. It tells of a meticulous annihilation that tore a nation away from its traditions, its language, its morality, its past, its future, its everything: "A woman whose six children died over three days in May 1933 lost her mind, stopped wearing clothes, unbraided her hair, and told everyone that the 'red broom' had taken her family away."

Her life had unraveled, her culture had unraveled--there's accidental symbolism in that unbraiding--and she unraveled. The land around her unraveled too: once a breadbasket, now a wasteland, a domain of the dead and those waiting to die, Muselmanner, as they were known in Auschwitz.

Neighbor was set against neighbor, cannibalism was far from rare (yes, you read that right).

By the time--it took less than a year--the red broom had completed its 1932-33 sweep (there were smaller sweeps before and after), roughly 3.9 million Ukrainians were dead: a decimation, and more. Countless others were deported, many to a Gulag that had plenty of demand for slave labor. Large numbers never returned.

Some of this came with collectivization, Stalin's decision to impose larger collective or state-owned farming across the USSR. Even Walter Duranty, the New York Times' Moscow correspondent and a reliable shill for the Soviet dictator, admitted that collectivization had been a "mess"; still, he said, while there had been casualties, "you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs." And quite often those casualties were not unwelcome to the regime. Communism, like the millenarian movements it succeeded, rested on the notion of a great sorting between sinners and saved. Collectivization could be used to weed out enterprising, more successful private farmers, the relentlessly demonized "kulaks" (a category regularly expanded to include peasants who owned, say, a cow or a pig more than their fellow villagers), who were too smart to be won over by deceptive promises of the bounty that Communism would bring to agriculture: They were another of the Soviet Union's disposable classes, "former people" in the sinister and, all too often, prophetic terminology of that era.

In Ukraine, the noose was drawn far tighter than anywhere else--a fact still denied by today's Kremlin and its apologists. The millions who starved to death there, like those who died in famines elsewhere in the USSR at that time, were, it is maintained, the victims of a reckless agricultural experiment, nothing more. Applebaum agrees that the "chaos of collectivization helped create the conditions that led to famine," but rightly goes on to argue that neither chaos, nor the weather, nor crop failure can account for the death toll in Ukraine, and especially that terrible spike in the spring of 1933. For that, the better explanation is a series of measures enacted by the regime that can only have been intended to kill. There's a reason this famine is known to Ukrainians as the "Holodomor," a term, Applebaum explains, derived from the Ukrainian words for hunger and extermination.

Stalin, writes Applebaum, "launched a famine within the famine, ... specifically targeted at Ukraine and Ukrainians." It was not enough to hit the region's faltering farms with grain-production targets they had no chance of meeting and then to requisition what they had managed to grow. Seed corn was often seized too, as were livestock, potatoes, and, eventually, just about anything else that someone might have hoped to eat. Houses were repeatedly ransacked in hunts for any hidden scraps. Cooking utensils (and other goods) might well be taken, too. Tight controls were imposed to restrict movement out of the countryside into hungry cities (which were often unable or unwilling to help in any case), let alone out of Ukraine. Exports of grain, however, continued. Millions in hard currency were worth more than millions of lives.

Traveling to find work elsewhere was out of the question. Farms and villages judged to have fallen particularly short of production quotas--no small number--were "blacklisted": burdened with yet more restrictions, confiscations, and prohibitions, and denied credit, essential services, and the right to barter or trade. The peasants were trapped, cut off. Not to be starving was a sign of guilt, inviting another search.

Applebaum records how a Polish diplomat crossing the border from rural Ukraine into an adjacent Russian province in May 1933 was left with the impression that he had crossed into "Western Europe," so great was the contrast. Ukraine had, quite clearly, been singled out.

And the reason for that was Stalin's recognition that Ukrainians' belief that they were a people distinct from their Russian neighbors was authentic and thus potentially dangerous. The confused period that followed the Bolshevik Revolution had seen two attempts to establish a separate Ukrainian state as well as a massive peasant uprising that had evolved into a war of all against all--and a serious threat to the nascent Soviet regime. When the Bolsheviks finally secured their hold over the country, they first played, by their dismal standards, nice. Ukrainians were led to believe that their Soviet Republic would, in a real sense, be Ukrainian and, often, run by Ukrainians.

That was never likely to be a solution acceptable to Stalin, that paradoxical Georgian enforcer of Russian imperial control, a man who knew a thing or two about nations--and how to break them. When, in 1925, Stalin declared that "the peasant question is the basis, the quintessence, of the national question," it was Ukraine that was on his mind. If Ukraine was to become "a true fortress of the USSR, a truly model republic," which Stalin had said that he wanted, the uncomfortably large, uncomfortably independent peasantry, the repository of so much of Ukrainian tradition and, in some sense, Ukraine's soul, would have to be ground down.

But Ukraine would have to be decapitated, too. Applebaum details the silencing and, often, destruction of much of Ukraine's intelligentsia, and the purge of a Ukrainian Communist Party with a membership too prone, the Kremlin suspected, to go its own way.

The Holodomor is properly understood only when it is understood as part of a broader, deeper assault on the Ukrainian national idea. Applebaum records how, even as "the famine was raging, ... Stalin's de facto spokesman in Ukraine forced through a decree eliminating Ukrainian textbooks as well as school lessons tailored to Ukrainian children"--another warning that Moscow had not finished with Ukraine. Taken as a whole, Stalin's multifaceted onslaught on Ukrainians as a people would (as Applebaum points out) "certainly" pass the test established for genocide by Raphael Lemkin, the legal scholar who coined the term. Indeed, Lemkin acknowledged as much. Whether it would meet the narrower definition of genocide set out in the U.N. Convention on Genocide is, Applebaum contends (perhaps too cautiously), a different matter, but, as she notes, that convention was heavily influenced by a Soviet Union that had no interest in being asked to answer for its crimes.

The final stage of genocide or ethnic cleansing--call it what you will--is usually the replacement of the old population with a new one. Russian peasants started to move into the emptied villages, the beginning of what Applebaum describes as a "slow-motion movement of Russians into a depopulated Ukraine" that was to last for decades, further blurring the idea of a Ukrainian Ukraine in a way that helped the Soviets then, and helps Vladimir Putin now.

The Holodomor was unmentionable in the Soviet Union until just before the USSR's collapse. And shamefully, indifference in the West played a part in greasing its transformation from a topic that was forbidden into one that came close to being forgotten. Applebaum rightly highlights the role played in the original Soviet cover-up by Times man Duranty, not least the way he so effectively smothered the reporting of Gareth Jones, a Welsh journalist who stepped off a train at a place he wasn't meant to, walked for three days through the hell the Holodomor was creating, and told the world what he had seen.

Memory can sometimes outlast efforts to repress it. When, in the late 1980s, it finally became possible to talk about the Holodomor in the USSR, the long-buried memories of those years played their part in paving the way to Ukrainian independence in 1991. This was perversely acknowledged by the "Russian-backed separatists" who (Applebaum relates) destroyed a Holodomor memorial in the occupied eastern Ukrainian town of Snizhne in 2015. It was a desecration that also echoed the Kremlin's attempts to escape the consequences of the past by evasion and denial, a would be rewriting of history that makes this compelling book all the more timely--and all the more necessary.

Mr. Mahoney holds the Augustine Chair in Distinguished Scholarship at Assumption College. His next book, The Humanitarian Subversion of Christianity: Why the Christian Religion Is Not the Religion of Humanity, will be published in 2018.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 National Review, Inc.
http://www.nationalreview.com/
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Stuttaford, Andrew. "The Red Broom." National Review, vol. 69, no. 22, 27 Nov. 2017, pp. 42+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A514616959/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e55dce83. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024.

QUOTED: "The book may appeal to anyone interested in the current global political divide and those that enjoy exploring the themes of communism, democracy, and authoritarianism."

Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

Anne APPLEBAUM

Doubleday Publishers, 2020, 224 pages, ISBN: 9780385545808

In her book, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, Anne Applebaum explores a political shift that many democracies face today. In her analysis of global democracies, Applebaum explains why authoritarianism is on the rise and how it is being welcomed by many. She argues that the world is becoming more authoritarian, and democracy is starting to slip, especially with the recent election of US President Donald Trump. Through her writing, Applebaum hopes to bring awareness to this phenomenon with the hope of recognizing it and resisting it.

Anne Applebaum is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, who has worked for several magazines and newspapers. These include The Spectator, The Evening Standard, Slate, The Daily and Sunday Telegraph, The Economist, The Independent, The Washington Post, and currently The Atlantic. Her career provides her with great access to the top decision-making circles both in Europe and the United States during critical times, including the fall of the Berlin Wall, or the Brexit referendum and its aftermath.

The book contains six distinct chapters that could exist as individual pieces. The first chapter serves as an introduction, by explaining how democracy rose up and is now starting to fall in Poland. She also introduces an essential theme of the book, individuals that she labels the new generation of "clercs," or "clerks" who assist in the disruption of democracy and support authoritarian policies. Both on the left and right, these pseudo- intellectuals undermine the core principles of democracy, "manipulate discontent" and serve as ideologies of the new, anti-democratic world. In her next chapter, Applebaum explains how anti-democratic sentiment can exist on both the far left and the far right. She gives the examples of Lenin's Soviet Union on the far left and Hitler's Nazi government on the far right. In this chapter, Applebaum mentions how clercs can use the media to spread narratives that assist the rise of authoritarianism. She earmarks Jacek Kurski, the director of state television in Poland, and how he used his media outlet to circulate conspiracy theories about communism. She compares him to his brother and tries to make the case that Jacek deliberately chose this darker path of conspiracy paddling, despite having the same upbringing as his brother who endorsed more democratic values. Applebaum argues that c onspiracy theories have an emotional appeal and are a simple explanation of events, so people easily believe them. However, they end up corroding the public trust in political institutions, which then becomes detrimental to a democratic regime.

The book's third chapter uses two different types of nostalgia to explain why authoritarianism is so appealing. Applebaum defines the first type of nostalgia as reflective nostalgia, in which people reflect on the past but do not wish to recreate it. The second type of nostalgia is restorative nostalgia, where people want to restore the past. This second type of nostalgia is where the problems begin. It plays on radically simple beliefs in things such as unity and patriotism to erode currently diverse and democratic governments. In the following chapter, Applebaum shows that the internet and technology have changed media to the point where false news is ubiquitous. Every radical idea can find an outlet for a narrative. She explains that those who run these hyper-partisan news outlets are the new generation of anti-democratic clercs who seek to sow distrust in the government. She uses the Vox Party of Spain and the Trump administration as examples of governments that have used conspiracy theories and false narratives to gain supporters and win elections.

Applebaum's fifth chapter shifts the focus away from European politics and focuses solely on the United States. She argues that America's democracy was not perfect at the time of its founding but has been improved upon drastically over time through expanding voting rights and civil rights. Applebaum claims that Trump and far-right Republicans are clercs who have adopted both far-left and far-right views of despair towards America. Trump's statements are pessimistic and anti-American and thus sow distrust in the government and democracy. She argues that Trump resembles a dictator and spreads a dangerous narrative for democracy. In her final chapter, Applebaum concludes her arguments by stating that we are currently going through a political shift but that political shifts are not uncommon. She gives the historical examples of the Dreyfus Affair in France, the recent 2019 protests in France, the Brexit referendum and the election of President Trump to explain her argument that history is circular. In this chapter, Applebaum also acknowledges the significance of Covid-19. She states that historically pandemics lead to the expansion of state power because people are willing to give up their freedoms for their safety. She predicts that more clercs will arise in the near future and hopes that the world stands against them to protect democracy.

This book's strengths lie in the sheer number of examples that Applebaum gives. Throughout the book, Applebaum focuses on a select few countries to explain her points and offers her personal experiences with government leaders and her colleagues. For example, Applebaum provides many details on Boris Johnson's reasoning behind Brexit, due to her personal connection to him. She also mentions other former colleagues whose opinions have shifted far to the right and uses this experience to showcase the lure of authoritarianism.

Although this book has its strength in knowledge, it is weak in clarity and falls short of its intentions. Upon acquiring this book, one would expect it to be a journalistic approach to a global political crisis. However, the book is a mix of journalism and memoir. Each chapter has the same structure. The first half is information about democracy and authoritarianism. However, the second half goes off at a tangent in which Applebaum flaunts her personal experiences or negatively describes her former colleagues so as to appear superior to them. There is also quite a plethora of bashing of former President Trump within the book, making her work seem less passionate and less professional. Applebaum makes no effort to hide her distaste for Trump and goes out of her way to attack his personal life, family, and even his hair.

Overall, this book is quite intriguing but challenging to follow, given Applebaum's fusion of memoir and journalistic style of writing. This book appeals mostly to a general audience. The academic reader may find it partly valuable, as it provides some behind the scenes information on decision making during critical historical moments. Despite these drawbacks, the book may appeal to anyone interested in the current global political divide and those that enjoy exploring the themes of communism, democracy, and authoritarianism.

Jonathan Nash

South Dakota State University, School of American & Global Studies

E-Mail: jonathan.nash@jacks.sdstate.edu

To cite this article: Jonathan Nash, Book Review "Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, Doubleday Publishers, 2020", Uluslararasi Iliskiler, Vol 19, No 76, 2022, pp. 101-103.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 International Relations Council of Turkey
https://www.uidergisi.com.tr/onceki-sayilar
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Nash, Jonathan. "Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism." Uluslararasi Iliskiler / International Relations, vol. 19, no. 76, winter 2022, pp. 101+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A743216479/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ea370b7f. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024.

QUOTED: "Anne Applebaum's new book is part captivating memoir and part analysis of a widely discussed recent trend, namely, the global retreat of liberal democracy."

Author(s): Venelin I. Ganev 1

Author Affiliations:

(1) grid.259956.4, 0000 0001 2195 6763, Miami University of Ohio, , Oxford, OH, USA

Anne Applebaum's new book is part captivating memoir and part analysis of a widely discussed recent trend, namely, the global retreat of liberal democracy. Her personal reminiscences converge on a theme she describes as "parting of friends": over the last two decades her rapport with many acquaintances deteriorated because they experienced a "change of mind" and turned from staunch supporters of liberalism into its spiteful critics. The analysis of democratic polities' travails converges on a different theme: 'Given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all of our societies eventually will' (p. 14). Applebaum's overarching objective is to demonstrate that the two narrative threads are interrelated: her main argument is that if we want to explain the circumstances under which democracy began to lose its shine, we need to comprehend why former liberals deserted their political creed. Some readers will dismiss this argument as grounded in an elite-centered approach that "misses the big picture." Others, however, will take seriously Applebaum's contention that objective interpretations of democracy's regress should not invoke exclusively theoretical paradigms, macro-sociological studies and historical patterns - they must also examine, as dispassionately as possible, the life stories of disillusioned intellectuals.

The book is divided in six chapters.

Chapter 1 presents a memorable account of the key event that provides a focal point of Appelbaum's reminiscences: a New Year's Eve party hosted by the author in Poland on December 31, 1999. Those present were not only close friends but admirers of classical liberalism who believed in "democracy, the rule of law, checks and balances" as well as in the salutary impact of the European Union's and NATO's eastward expansion (p. 2). Subsequently, however, some of them became unabashed backers of authoritarian leaders such as Hungary's Victor Orbán, others began to traffic in the conspiracy theories disseminated by Poland's Law and Justice party, and still others embraced anti-EU causes like Brexit. Through their actions and inactions, she asserts, they contributed to the creation of 'the right conditions' for democratic backsliding.

The opening chapter also introduces the central leitmotif which runs through the book. In an effort to fathom the peregrinations of her former friends, Appelbaum deploys an interpretative framework felicitously described by Jan-Werner Müller as 'the Benda model', a framework based on Julien Benda's well-known critical examination of modes of elite behavior that appear to be 'wrong when judged against a set of liberal democratic standards'.1 The proper way to think about her protagonists' 'change of mind,' Applebaum asserts, is as a form of 'treason of intellectuals' (pp. 17-18). Back in the 1990s they were champions of constitutionalism who advocated toleration and the free and informed exchange of ideas. Presently, they 'argue that breaking the constitution or twisting the law is the right thing to do' (p. 17) and are actively involved in what Benda called 'the intellectual organization of political hatreds'.2

In the next four chapters Applebaum tells the story of her relationships with various individuals in Eastern Europe (Chapter 2), the United Kingdom (Chapter 3), Western Europe (Chapter 4) and the United States (Chapter 5) - while delineating several analytical strategies for interpreting these characters' disturbing metamorphoses. Some of the personalities featured in her mnemonic vignettes are well known to English-speaking audiences (e.g. Boris Johnson and Laura Ingraham), but most are relatively obscure (e.g. Jacek Kurski, John O'Sullivan, Rafael Bardaji).

Why are such individuals important? They are important, Appelbaum asserts, because their lives' trajectories exemplify the broader trend that worries her so much. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s all of them endorsed some version of the liberal credo; today, however, they vociferously denounce it. Such characters are also important, the author shows, because they are something more than venal political entrepreneurs engaged in self-interested pursuits or sycophants prone to opportunistic submissions. To use Hannah Arendt's Aristotelian terminology, these men and women live a vita activa : they enjoy the freedom to reimagine and renew their way of life as political beings, they are unquestionably 'devoted to the matters of the polis, ' and their involvement in communal affairs is aimed at the creation of such 'conditions of remembrance' ensuring the preservation of specific historical heritages.3 Compared to 1999, what is different today is that the effort to reinvent themselves has led them to ever-deepening associations with aspiring autocrats and populists, their vision of the polis is no longer suffused with values like the rule of law or European unity, and the historical legacies they commemorate have nothing to do with the classical liberal tradition.

Making it clear why they embraced such a mission, Applebaum insists, is not an easy task: 'There is no single explanation.. I will not offer either a grand theory or a universal solution' (p. 14). Wisely, she is reluctant to endorse a one-size-fits-all accounts - such as the common yet simplistic tale of how the rise of 'neoliberalism' triggered democracy's backsliding. Given the baffling intricacy of the stories that zig-zagged before the author's eyes, her methodological modesty is easy to understand: surely there can be no parsimoniously neat formula that would make it obvious why of two brothers who were 'born in the same family [and] started out in the same place and at the same time' one, the above-mentioned Jacek Kurski, became an enthusiastic Law and Justice supporter, whereas the other, Jaroslaw Kurski, currently "edits the largest and most influential liberal Polish newspaper" (p. 29).

Instead of pledging allegiance to a pet theory, then, Applebaum pursues a variety of analytical routes. The balance sheet is a mixed one.

In Chapter 2, for example, Applebaum tries to account for liberal democracy's latest setbacks by invoking the adverse effects of meritocracy. Her remarks are not entirely devoid of analytical value - what she has to say about the vantage points from which 'a one-party state' might appear to be "actually more fair than a competitive democracy" is important and illuminating (p. 27). Overall, however, Applebaum's efforts to depict former classical liberals as enragés antagonized by meritocracy's false promises hardly amount to a coherent interpretative exposé. Michael Young, who invented the term 'meritocracy, did point out that 'every selection of one is a rejection of many' and thus the cause of vexations and aggravations.4 Denouncing classical liberalism is only one of many options available to those 'many'. Young also maintained that most liberal democracies are political systems where, if a person 'on one occasion [is] off-colour, they have a second, a third, and a fourth opportunity to demonstrate their ability'.5 And it is undeniable that the characters Applebaum discusses took advantage of numerous opportunities to get ahead. It would be impossible to characterize someone like O'Sullivan - who, in addition to writing speeches for Margaret Thatcher also "attended parties with Rupert Murdoch and went to expensive dinners with Conrad Black" (p. 101) - as having failed some kind of a 'selection process'. Still, he eventually ended up in Orbán's camp. In contrast, many of those who attended Applebaum's 1999 party never attained "stardom" and yet remained committed to the ideas they held in 1999. The evidence suggests that the degree to which a society recognizes individuals' 'merits' appears to be a poor predictor of their political behavior more generally and their attitudes towards classical liberalism in particular.

At various junctures, and especially in Chapter 4, Applebaum invokes the symptoms attributed to 'authoritarian personalities' in order to explain her protagonists' regressive intellectual journeys - but falls short of the desired objective. The concept of 'authoritarian personality' - originally introduced by the Frankfurt School and recently revived by the Australian political scientist Karen Stenner - purports to capture the predispositions of average citizens and to explicate the choices made by ordinary people.6 Applebaum, however, does not deal with average citizens and ordinary people, which is why her reflections on "authoritarian personalities" are not well integrated in the stories she tells about her friendships. To this one might add that the concept is intended to encapsulate a more or less permanent state of mind - it is practically useless when the issue at stake is why a particular individual abandons a set of deeply-held ideas and embraces a very different worldview.

Other interpretative themes Applebaum handles in analytically more productive ways. One such theme, developed in Chapter 3, is the re-emergence across contemporary Europe of a sentiment which Fritz Stern, writing about late nineteenth century Germany, called "cultural despair."7 This sentiment is flaunted by intellectual gurus who assert that the past abounds in examples of individual greatness, collective achievements and civilizational accomplishments, but the present is dominated by run-of-the-mill mediocrities. For example, Simon Heffer, former deputy editor of the British magazine The Spectator and one of Applebaum's more memorable protagonists, refers to what the UK has become in the post-Thatcher era as a 'banana republic with worthless institutions' (p. 81). But what Applebaum also indicates is that 'the politics of cultural despair' today is different from the nineteenth century prototype. According to Stern, in its original format was propelled by 'prophets' who not only 'pointed the way to a national rebirth' but also promoted 'fantastic' utopias that promised to regenerate 'all existing reality'.8 In contrast, Applebaum's former friends do not seek to replace liberalism construed as a set of universal values with their own set of universal values: in their minds, abstract liberal principles are juxtaposed to the parochial, the local, the insular. It is not in order to experience the adrenaline rush induced by utopian quests that they forsake liberal democracy: rather, they abandon liberal democracy because they crave the reassuring intimacy of the familiar.

So, why do former liberals become illiberal? Having examined her protagonists' life trajectories, she has reached the conclusion that, for a variety of reasons, at some point in their personal development her former friends felt that the ideological pasture of classical liberalism no longer afforded enough emotional and intellectual sustenance. They then ventured beyond this pasture - and many of them never came back. Some readers might find this conclusion vague or even banal. Others, however, might accept Applebaum's argument that the ebbs and flows of contemporary politics are not determined exclusively by the gigantic clash between two monolithic blocks consisting of liberal democracy's determined friends and its implacable foes: the dynamics that propels such fluctuations are crucially shaped by apostates and defectors who migrate from one block to the other.

Applebaum's most stimulating contribution is her analysis of the specific ways in which former-liberals-turned-illiberal-clercs facilitated the dismantlement of liberal institutions and practices in countries such as Poland, Hungary and Spain. She argues credibly that 'no contemporary authoritarian can succeed without.. the writers, spin doctors, producers of television programs, and creators of memes who can sell their image to the public' (p. 17) and demonstrates that it is precisely individuals like her former friends who now play the role of 'a new elite' whose mission is to 'undermine our current values, and then to imagine the new system to come' (p.18).

How do the new clercs create 'the right conditions' for democratic backsliding? Three interrelated yet distinct themes articulated by Applebaum stand out: such individuals engage in 'whataboutism' (p.100), they help spread 'medium-size lies' (p.38), and they stoke 'hyper-partisanship' (p.114).

Whataboutism is a strategy for deflecting criticism of particular leaders or policies by accusing the critic of hypocrisy. It has been widely used in the past, e.g. by pro-Soviet intellectuals who tried to discredit former friends who had become anti-communists (Jean-Paul Sartre's remark 'Yes, Camus, like you, I find [Soviet concentration] camps inadmissible, but equally inadmissible is the use that the 'so-called bourgeois press' makes of them every day' would be a good example).9 In order to be effective, such defense strategies must offer to voters and audiences a mosaic of historical analogies, emotionally charged political comparisons and stories that somehow make sense. The pieces of knowledge that constitute such mosaics might not be readily available to unlettered populist leaders - and it is the function of the members of such leaders' intellectual entourage to provide them.

What twenty-first century clercs also do is practice medium-size lies - a term which Applebaum borrows from the Yale historian Timothy Snyder.10 It refers to the ongoing effort to motivate one's followers 'to engage.. with an alternative reality' (p. 38) - and this is not an easy endeavor. Arguably, the usage of medium-size lies might be considered a form of 'pandering', the 'pseudo-art' which Plato described as 'catching fools with the bait of ephemeral pleasure and tricking them into holding it in the highest esteem'.11 What is important to grasp, however is that the ephemeral pleasures might vanish if not properly sustained - and public perceptions regarding what should be help in highest esteem are fickle. There is no ready-made formula for ensuring the success of medium-size lies: maximizing their impact is a matter of trial and error and is crucially dependent on the deployment of complex political weaponries which Applebaum describes as 'marketing techniques, audience segmentation and social-media campaigns' (p. 38). Clercs who possess the ability to create context-specific cultural bricolages are likely to figure out what works and what does not - and are also adept at learning how to use political weaponries. Applebaum's account of 'the Smolensk tragedy' is especially revealing in that respect. In 2010 a Polish plane crashed near that Russian city killing dozens of prominent Poles, including then-president Lech Kaczynski. His brother, Jaroslaw, was determined to use this event in order to galvanize his supporters but he did not immediately endorse a particular interpretation of what had happened - sometimes be blamed the Russians, sometimes the then-ruling party, and sometimes the Polish military establishment. It took some time for his public statements on the subject to cohere into a medium-size lie about villainy and treachery. Notably, it was the new clercs who facilitated the process by providing the requisite fine-tuning of manipulative narratives, shifts of emphasis, and rearrangement of innuendoes (pp. 42-45).

Finally, Applebaum's book illuminates the negative consequences of the hyper-partisanship, or, more precisely, the effort to demolish the very notion that political conflict might be resolved by non-partisan or apolitical institutions. Clercs are indispensable to this effort as well. First, they are good at resurrecting dormant prejudices against the very notion of political neutrality - and it bears emphasizing that while prejudices might be easily turned into a political resource (they radiate with certain 'maternal warmth', Alain Finkielkraut reminds us, which makes them indispensable to political entrepreneurs whose objective is 'to undo thought'),12 it does require an intellectual effort to maintain their effectiveness as ideological munitions. Second, clercs systematically add to the distrust of 'normal' politics, 'establishment' politicians, derided 'experts', and 'mainstream' institutions - including courts, police, civil servants' (p.114). Thus they diminish liberal democracy's ability to absorb frustrations and resentments through the workings of enduring rules and institutions. In the polarized world created by populist leaders and their clercs a particular idea increasingly gains acceptance: the idea that if the rules of the liberal-democratic game do not ensure the success of my party, then the rules of the game should be abandoned.

In the concluding Chapter 7 (entitled 'The Unending of History') Applebaum forcefully reminds us that the proper way to think about liberal democracy is as a fragile regime prone to retrogressions. It might very well be the case, she asserts, that like 'glittering, multiethnic Habsburg Vienna or creative, decadent Weimer Berlin' many modern democracies will 'be swept into irrelevance' (p. 185). Surely, this is not a groundbreaking insight - all political regimes are destined to crumble. And yet, this book is well worth reading: it weaves together compelling personal stories told by a skillful writer; it demonstrates the usefulness and interpretative potential of the Benda model; and it astutely analyzes the role of disgruntled former liberals who, for whatever reasons, have become intellectual associates of democratically elected illiberal leaders. Is it not the conduct of her former friends that is the primary cause of such retrogressions? - but, as "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day',13 such intellectuals' interventions steadily steer processes of change in illiberal directions. To democracy's supporters, Applebaum sends a clear message: we 'should choose our friends.. with great care' (p. 188). But she also shows that, no matter how carefully we choose, 'history.. could reach into our private lives and rearrange them' and 'the possibility of failure' will always hang over liberal democracy (p. 189). Even readers who may dispute this diagnosis are likely to judge that the author of this book has provided distinctive reasons for thinking why we should regard the future with foreboding.

1 Jan-Werner Müller, 'The Failure of European Intellectuals?' Eurozine , April 11, 2012, available at:

https://www.eurozine.com/the-failure-of-european-intellectuals/

.Cf. Julien Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), originally published as La trahison des clercs (1928).
2 Benda (1969), p. 27.

3 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), p.13, p. 9.

4 Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2008), p. 5.

5 Ibid., p.97.

6 Theodor Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950); Karen Stenner, The Authoritarian Dynamic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

7 Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1961).

8 Fritz Stern, ibidem., p.xi. The 'prophets' he discusses are Paul de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck.

9 Jean-Paul Sartre, 'Reply to Albert Camus' in Sartre and Camus: A Historic Confrontation , David A. Sprintzen and Adrian van den Hoven, eds., (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2004), p.142.

10 Timothy Snyder, "The Cowardly Face of Authoritarianism," The New York Times , December 3, 2018:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/03/opinion/authoritarian-leaders-trump-putin-orban.html

.
11 Plato, Gorgias , 464c5-d5, (London: Penguin Books, 1960), p. 32.

12 Alain Finkielkraut, The Undoing of Thought (London: Claridge Press, 1988), p. 24.

13 William Shakespeare, Macbeth , Act.5, Scene 5, 22-24 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), p. 177.

Article notes:

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Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Ganev, Venelin I. "Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends." Society, vol. 59, no. 1, Feb. 2022, pp. 86+. Gale General OneFile, dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12115-022-00679-y. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024.

QUOTED: "This brilliant personal essay--easily the shortest of Applebaum's books--grips you from the first page."

TWILIGHT OF DEMOCRACY

The failure of politics and the parting of friends

ANNE APPLEBAUM

224pp. Allen Lane. 16.99 [pounds sterling].

WHEN BORIS JOHNSON was mayor of London, he had dinner with Anne Applebaum and the subject of Brexit (as it wasn't then called) came up. "Nobody serious wants to leave the EU", he assured her. "It won't happen." The story is presented as an example of how people switched sides, often for careerist reasons. But what he told her was, of course, indisputably right: even a year before the referendum hardly any politicians or commentators wanted to leave the European Union. Then suddenly, everything changed. Why?

This brilliant personal essay--easily the shortest of Applebaum's books--grips you from the first page. It's a tale of ambition, power and betrayal: about how the people she knew and trusted came to support an insurgency that would once have disgusted them. This matters, she argues, because this is how democracies can fall. Authoritarians succeed when intellectuals and journalists pave the way for them--as happened before, and is happening now.

The template she uses is Julien Benda's essay La Trahison des clercs (1927), which looked at how fallen intellectuals served as apologists for dictators. If liberal democracy is to fall now, she says, it will require a new elite, a new generation of clercs, to bring it about. These are the intellectuals, journalists and even bloggers whose work and methods she knows well because (as she puts it) "many of them used to be my friends".

Her story starts at a dinner party on New Year's Eve, 1999, which she hosted with her husband, Radek Sikorski, then a junior government minister in Poland. It was quite a night: about a hundred guests were at their country house for the party. At one point, someone even fired a gun into the air in excitement at what the new decade would bring. Now, she says, half of those who were there that night would not even speak to the other half and she, for her part, would cross the road to avoid some of them.

By 2015, Sikorski's party were out of power and Poles voted in the Law and Justice Party. Applebaum presents them as a band of nativist homophobes intent on vandalizing the constitution and appointing cronies. But how do such people win? This takes us to a striking and fascinating point: the problem with democracy. She cites research saying about a third of people in every country apparently have an "authoritarian predisposition"--an inability to tolerate complexity, being suspicious of people with different ideas, etc. The clercs are needed to reach out to them.

So who are they? Often the old and angry, seeking career revival. In Poland we meet Jacek Kurski, not an ideologue but someone who "wants the power and fame that he felt was unjustly denied" in the first quarter-century after communism. His links with the Law and Justice Party saw him plucked from that obscurity to become director of Polish state television--which he turned into a propaganda station. So, like many other clercs, his career was going nowhere until populism came along. Like others, he didn't really resent the old system--he just resented his failure to advance within it.

In America we meet Laura Ingraham, a former Reagan speechwriter who "drifted" into the world of conservative media, tried and failed to get her own TV show then ended up on radio instead. But we find her now, aged fifty-seven, somehow flourishing on Fox News. What explains her reversal of fortunes? Her Reaganite optimism gave way to "apocalyptic pessimism" and she can be found describing illegal immigrants as thieves and murderers --in spite of having adopted three immigrants as children. Such contradictions, Applebaum says, explain the force of her anger.

And in Britain, we have Simon Heffer. Applebaum was once close enough to Heffer to be godmother to one of his children: but they fell out and we see him becoming so grumpy that he comes to regard his country as a "banana republic". Almost as grumpy is the late Roger Scruton, whose England: An elegy (2000) is described as an example of an "outpouring of cultural despair". This despair underlies her idea of Brexit as a mix of nostalgia for the past, resentment towards the present and a willingness to embrace the politics of rage in the hope of bringing yesterday back to life.

But it's at this point that the evidence wears thin. Take one passage, used to support her argument that Brexiteers actively wanted disruption, thinking that bedlam would make it possible to convert nostalgia for the past into a future agenda.

A sudden drop in economic activity would be good for the nation's
soul, some came to believe. Everyone would buck up, tighten their
belts and work harder. "The British are among the worst idlers in
the world," a group of pro-Brexit MPs wrote of their countrymen:
they needed a shock, a period of hardship, a challenge ... to force
the slothful, decadent modern state to regain, in Johnson's words,
"the dynamism of those bearded Victorians."
Chilling stuff. Until you realize that the words she quotes were written not around the 2016 referendum but four years earlier by a group of free-market Tories--some of them "Remainers"--moaning about low productivity. To enlist their words as proof of the destructive intent of Brexiteers is a bit of stretch. Johnson, for his part, was praising the Victorians for being open and globally-minded. And rather than bemoan slothful decadence in that speech, he was saluting modern Britain as "the most innovative economy in Europe; the tech capital of the hemisphere; a place where one Oxbridge college boasts more Nobel prizes than France ..." His list went on.

For fans of Applebaum's always meticulous work (and I count myself as a superfan) it's odd to find this. And other slips. Theresa May, for example, didn't deploy the "divisive language of 'hard' and 'soft' Brexit": these terms were used by her opponents, to great effect. Brexiteers certainly were guilty of many blunders: they were dangerously optimistic, naive about how easy Brexit talks would be. But a bunch of deranged doomsters, disgusted with their country and hellbent on plunging it into the abyss?

This captures the problem of the book: her narrative is captivating but does not fit all the many scenarios to which she applies it. She doesn't allow enough for alternative arguments: to ask why, if Brexit is so illiberal, Boris Johnson abolished the immigration target on his first day as prime minister and still wants amnesty for illegal migrants. Or whether the friends who celebrated with her when the Berlin Wall came down--and back Brexit now--may have done both not because they changed their minds but because they always believed in national self-determination.

Throughout her book, we do see self-reflection: hints of how old elites (even hers) may have been a tiny bit complacent. She describes a feeling among her friends in the post-Cold War years, "a belief that 'we had won', that the democratic revolution would now continue"--or, at least, continue in the direction she wanted. "But that moment turned out to be briefer than we expected."

In his essay, Benda also warned about hubris and about people who came to believe that "their movement is merely carrying out the spirit of history and so must necessarily triumph". It makes them angry when they lose, having convinced themselves that they are the agent of good in the world --and that, therefore, their enemy must be the agent of evil. When politics is conducted along such lines, he writes, political disagreement descends into the "intellectual organization of political hatreds".

The antidote to this, surely, comes in resisting hatred. Asking not why your enemy is so wicked, but why he has so much support. Asking whether his voters might have some legitimate, unaddressed concerns--about the speed of demographic change, for example, or the side-effects of globalization. And the good news: when established parties do take the hint and adjust, they can recover. Suddenly, there is no need for populists. So goodbye, UKIP. Good riddance, Golden Dawn.

This could be an alternative, happier ending to her story: that democracy is not in its twilight but blazing more brightly than ever, forcing political elites to take notice of people they had thought safe to ignore. Applebaum may be vindicated in her pessimism about our age and times. But it's not impossible that a stronger form of liberal democracy will come out of all this: more inclusive, less dismissive and carrying with it a greater degree of public consent.

Boris Johnson on the cover of the London Evening Standard, September 2019

Caption: Fraser Nelson is the editor of the Spectator

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 NI Syndication Limited
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/
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Nelson, Fraser. "Falling out over staying in: How Brexit divided the political and media elites." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 6139, 27 Nov. 2020, p. 7. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A646304532/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4c04d8f5. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024.

Another Betrayal of the Intellectuals

Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

Anne Applebaum

New York, NY: Doubleday, 2020.

For the better part of a century, Berlin has been a misplaced city. Sitting only about fifty miles from the Polish border, it was an island in the middle of the German Democratic Republic during the Cold War. To some extent, it still is. The German Hauptstadt, run by and, to a large extent, for the elites, is in the middle of the state of Brandenburg, which has struggled to keep pace with frenetic Berlin. Berliners are likely to know something about life in Munich, Hamburg, Frankfurt, and the cities clustered along the shores of the Rhine; but if you ask them about Brandenburg, they are likely to shrug, knowing next to nothing about life there.

Berlin is a city of young creatives and old careerists--the perfect blend for the global capitalism of the early twenty-first century. It is not surprising, then, that Germany's greatest city has seen steady growth for most of the years since the reunification of the country's two halves in 1990. Brandenburg, on the other hand, though it has done better than many other "eastern" regions, has failed to achieve Berlin-type growth, thus setting up what might have been a perfect storm of envy, resentment, and revenge. Our populist narratives, often driven by a kind of economic determinism, would suggest that the haves of Berlin and the have-nots of Brandenburg would clash. Yet there has been very little populist animosity aimed at the citadel of Berlin from the fields of Brandenburg. But why is this? Why do such divisions spark revolt in some regions, while in others, people, well, get on with it? Why do some democracies seem fragile, teetering on the edge of collapse, while others appear robust even in the midst of the unprecedented challenges of widespread disease, joblessness, and general discontent?

Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism is an attempt to answer such questions. In a six-chapter journey of privilege and loss, Anne Applebaum takes us into the intensely personal breakup of the anticommunist center-right in Europe, England, and the United States. From the euphoria of early post-Cold War Europe to the recent populist or "authoritarian" uprisings in Poland and Hungary, and the related movements in Brexit-bound Britain and Donald Trump's United States, Applebaum weaves anecdotes through each chapter as she tells of friends lost to the authoritarian enticements referred to in her book's subtitle. The result is a social history of the new "conservative" elites that have emerged in Poland, Hungary, Britain, Spain, and, of course, the United States.

A journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, she has lived in Poland irregularly since 1988, as well as London and Washington, making as many friends as she has lost along the way. It's the friends she lost who drive the narrative of Twilight of Democracy. She reads her former traveling partners in the anticommunist right as characters in Julien Benda's La Trahison des clercs, a famous 1927 broadside flaying the intellectual and cultural elites who "betrayed" France in the early twentieth century, notably during the Dreyfus Affair. By tracing their routes into authoritarianism in Poland and Hungary, in particular, Applebaum informs, in a sense, on her former friends: Who are they, how do they operate, how do they feel about their work, how do they communicate with each other and their followers, what relationship do they have with American political actors, and what does she recommend for further action?

Probing her memories, Applebaum gives hints of her own brand of center-right liberalism, one that is marked by the sting of betrayal and, in her occasional encounters with erstwhile friends, intimations that she views them as simpleminded or driven by selfish ambition. Reading between the lines, one comes away with the sense that the betrayal goes both ways: Her friends feel just as betrayed by her liberal conservatism as she does by their revanchism. Applebaum's is an account of passions coursing through friendships over time, of resentment, revenge, and envy.

The book opens on December 31, 1999, in rural Poland, where Applebaum and her husband, the Polish journalist and politician Radoslaw Sikorski, are throwing a New Year's Eve party. Amid the reportage of various tantalizing but vague details, we are introduced to a series of nameless characters, most of whom bonded together in the Polish political "right": those who identified as both conservative and anticommunist. All are equally well educated, speak multiple foreign languages, and live in big, thriving cities, often traveling to other global hubs. Fast-forward two decades, and many of those revelers are no longer on speaking terms. At one point, Applebaum confesses that she would even cross the street to avoid some of the people who had been at her party. The question that situated Applebaum and her onetime friends on either side of a sharp divide was that of the nation's cultural boundaries: How are they defined? How should they be defined? Who gets to define them? In short, she and they found themselves at odds over the simple but nevertheless challenging question, "Who are we?"

There are, in fact, multiple "we's in this book--the "we" of the nation, the "we" of intellectual and political elites, the "we" of the postcommunist generation of conservatives. For Applebaum, the recent struggles over the specific boundaries of the national "we" emerge from the ways in which her circle of anticommunist conservatives accommodated themselves to the new realities of central European democracies. In the heady days following the collapse of communism, most of those in her circle were directly involved with building "western" institutions--freedom of the press, the rule of law, international collaboration--often finding themselves employed as journalists by center-right magazines or as aides to the politicians they and those of like mind lionized: Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, of course, but also the Polish dissident-turned-president Lech Walesa. But the tensions between conservatism's inclination to preserve national culture and anticommunism's definitional tendency toward economic liberalization were always latent, and over the course of the last two decades, tensions became fissures and then unbridgeable chasms.

The most notorious example of conservativism's breakup is Poland's Law and Justice party. Initially a center-right party not unlike Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union, which has steadily led Germany for most of the last two decades, Law and Justice has migrated toward the far right. The galvanizing event was the plane crash that killed Polish president Lech Kaczynski in April 2010. Kaczynski was en route to Smolensk, Russia, for an event to commemorate the Katyn Massacre (the mass execution in 1940 of more than 21,000 interned Polish soldiers at the direction of Joseph Stalin), and was planning to use the occasion to launch his reelection campaign. The aircraft attempted a landing in thick fog in Smolensk, which did not have a proper airport, just a tree-lined runway. In addition to the president and his wife, dozens of senior military officials and politicians died in the accident.

The Smolensk disaster was Poland's 9/11. As in the United States, there was an initial outpouring of emotion. In Poland's case, national mourning quickly gave way to conspiracy theories. While the recovered black box told a story of pilot error that was likely brought on by a politician's earnest desire for punctuality, Kaczyhski's identical-twin brother, Jaroslaw, who was also the leader of Law and Justice, searched for other explanations. Jaroslaw Kaczynski began pushing what became known as the "Smolensk Conspiracy," at times implying that the Russian government had downed the plane and at others blaming the left-of-center party that had formerly ruled Poland. None of this was true, but it didn't need to be. Having decided to run for president in his late brother's stead, Jaroslaw Kaczynski won the election handily. Within weeks, there was evidence that Law and Justice was undermining the courts and public media.

Like Donald Trump pushing the suggestion that Barack Obama wasn't born in the United States, the surviving Kaczynski brother knew the truth of the matter. But unlike the European institutions that were wagging their fingers at his party's human-rights abuses, Kaczynski knew the value of the "Medium-Sized Lie," a term Applebaum borrows from the historian Timothy Snyder. As opposed to the "Big Lie" that proclaims that "black is white, war is peace, and that state farms have achieved 1000 percent of their planned production," the Medium-Sized Lie doesn't require violence or terror police for reinforcement. It stops short of any obvious conflict with everyday reality. But as Applebaum notes, such lies set the moral groundwork for other lies, some of greater consequence. In the cases of Poland and Hungary, Medium-Sized Lies have opened the door to formerly off-limits tropes such as the international Jewish conspiracy, as well as the less sinister though no less powerful supposition that western Europe is betraying its historical Christian cultural identity.

Applebaum argues that running through these conspiracies and anxieties are two types of nostalgia that, intermingling, produce an affective environment that blurs the lines between the elegiac mourning of death and the hopeful expectation of rebirth. "Reflective" and "restorative" nostalgia, as she classifies them, are often practiced by different types of clercs, the reflective variant being a construct of the intellectual, the restorative an instrument of the politician. With this insight, Applebaum turns her attention to "western" European cases, arguing that the lure of authoritarianism is not just some "eastern" quirk left over from the communist days. Just as Poland and Hungary search for stories about their culture that honor the dead and empower the living, more-established democracies such as the United Kingdom seek ways to understand their changing place in the world. Always at odds with its European identity, Britain (particularly England) was ultimately unsatisfied with its post-imperial role as powerful insider in a new kind of empire--the consensus-driven consultative institutions of the European Union that reach into each nation-state's regulatory structure. No less inclined to conspiracy thinking than anyone else, the English mourned their loss of historical identity and sought something to blame, converging on dissatisfaction with the ill-conceived and poorly managed EU institutions and regulations.

Applebaum guides us through the dimly lit corridors of the Berlaymont and Westminster, the seats of power in Brussels and London, respectively. Her muse and, or rather jester, is the current British prime minister, Boris Johnson, who burnished his conservative reputation by mocking the EU and its besetting attraction to new rules, regulations, and policy guidance. Often stretching the truth, and occasionally manufacturing evidence and quotations, Johnson gave voice to a powerful undercurrent in England: Who are the Brussels "Eurocrats" to dictate to the mighty British how big our pillows should be? Not quite a Medium-Sized Lie, Johnson's mockery of the EU channeled England's latent nationalism. Riding the thin line between irony and cynicism, Johnson's jibes made for jocular dinner banter among reflective nostalgies and resentful stump speeches among restorative nostalgies. Together, reflective and restorative nostalgia, expressed respectively by conservative philosophet Roger Scruton's elegies for English culture and ultranationalist Nigel Farage's barnstorming anti-EU campaigns, created a powerful rhetorical environment in which an audacious policy would become law.

As a campaign, Brexit was a smashing success. American and British conservatives and their observers in the media often combine it with Trump's equally shocking election as a single populist revolt against cosmopolitan elites. But for Applebaum's clercs, the new conservative movement is multilingual: It speaks Polish and Hungarian just as well as English. Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary since 2010, is especially inspirational to some for the simple reason that he is successful. Like his populist confreres in Poland, Orban has increasingly brought judiciary, media, and cultural institutions under direct political control, eliciting cries of panic both inside and outside Hungary. Orban has made George Soros a scapegoat for many of Hungary's supposed problems, blaming him in particular for mass immigration that never actually materialized but whose evocation nonetheless frightened many Hungarians. Gone are the days when a nationalist party had no interest in what was going on beyond its borders. Symposiums, secret and public, provide today's ultranationaliste from various countries opportunities for "knowledge shares" and "practitioner exchanges," as Europeans call them. For the first time, nationalism is a kind of globalism.

About halfway through Applebaum's book, one senses that she is in effect describing a kind of "Conservative International." With syndicates in Warsaw, Budapest, London, Madrid, Washington, and other points around the globe, Appelbaum's Con-Intern seems at times to be stretched a little thin. There are indeed contact points between Orban and Trump, between Johnson and Kaczyriski. But there are also important differences. Neither English nor American populism is yet truly authoritarian. The very fact that English nostalgia is still just as much reflective as it is restorative suggests that Johnson and his populist-inclined Conservative Party are, at the moment, not equivalent to Orban's Fidesz and Kaczyriski's Law and Justice. Trump is, of course, a slightly more disconcerting case. While he has been able to fund pet projects without congressional approval and repurpose existing appropriations, Trump's most unsettling suggestions have not come to fruition. But the potential or motive is certainly there. We will in the coming years likely learn more about his crass self-dealing, but for the moment Trump is not obviously an American Orbdn. However, the effect Trump has had on American political culture more generally is far more worrisome: Will future presidents or members of Congress consider it acceptable to use their public office first and foremost for personal gain?

In her penultimate chapter on the fracturing of the American conservative movement, Applebaum tracks the rise of Fox News host Laura Ingraham, arguing that the vision of Trump's "American carnage" was complemented by the work of a range of like-minded clercs who offered an equally dark vision that would top anything the far left ever envisioned for the United States. Applebaum finds Ingraham's America to be a "dark, nightmarish place where God speaks to only a tiny number of people; where idealism is dead; where civil war and violence are approaching; where democratically elected politicians are no better than foreign dictators and mass murderers; where the 'elite' is wallowing in decadence, disarray, death." According to this vision, centrist bipartisan policies are nothing less than betrayal.

For the better part of the last four decades, Republicans have been at the vanguard of defending the genius of the American constitutional order. Often mythologizing its origins or making some of its grossly immoral compromises seem simply disagreeable, conservatives have worried about flag burning, condemned anti-American sentiment at home and abroad, and shouted down anything that challenged the wisdom of the market. If there were any party that would brook no equivalence with foreign dictatorships or tolerate deference to a Russian president over its own intelligence community, you would think it would be the Republicans. Applebaum gives voice to the largely unspoken desperation of a fading center-right liberalism: How could the Enlightenment's greatest political project transform into Trump's grievance politics, on the one hand, and the Democratic Party's increasingly purist politics, on the other? Is it all just that fragile?

Democracy's fragility might just be the point of it all. In the final chapter of her book, Applebaum turns to musings of a higher order. There is, for her, no such thing as a permanent solution to the vexations of democracy, no amount of reform or restructuring that will make unnecessary the bothersome task of continual negotiation, of constantly staying alert to the potential failure of our democratic institutions. Whatever elitism or condescension might shade her response to former traveling partners in the anticommunist European right is quietly ushered off stage in the conclusion: Applebaum's point is not to settle scores, but to warn us that it can happen anywhere, even in Germany. Indeed, it might already be happening in the United States.

In recent years, it has become commonplace for political commentators to wring their hands over the weakness of democratic institutions. But if Applebaum is right, maybe we are just coming to know something essential about democracy: Like human friendships, it is contingent, as easily lost through carelessness as through betrayal.

Jonathan D. Teubner

Jonathan D. Tcubner is a research fellow at the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry, Australian Catholic University (Melbourne), and an associate fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, University of Virginia.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture
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Teubner, Jonathan D. "Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism." The Hedgehog Review, vol. 22, no. 3, fall 2020, pp. 134+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A645242024/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=13e3a384. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024.

QUOTED: "central to any discussion of modern totalitarianism."

Applebaum, Anne AUTOCRACY, INC. Doubleday (NonFiction None) $27.00 7, 23 ISBN: 9780385549936

The noted journalist and student of tyranny turns her attention to Trump, Putin, and numerous other modern authoritarians.

"A world in which autocracies work together to stay in power, work together to promote their system, and work together to damage democracies is not some distant dystopia," writes Applebaum. "That world is the one we are living in right now." In the meantime, she notes, democracies, as if paralyzed, accommodate both the lawlessness of the autocrats and the violence they incite: Witness, for instance, the growing myth that Jan. 6, 2021, was acceptable political expression. Whereas autocrats once worked singly, today they're shored up by an international kleptocracy and shared understandings--don't criticize my oppressiveness, and I won't criticize yours--that make allies of disparate rulers from Washington to Budapest to Harare. These rulers are shameless, Applebaum notes. They no longer bother to disguise their acts of aggression and brutality, as with Putin's invasion of Ukraine, a declaration that old rules no longer applied. Autocrats differ in style, but they share a hatred for an independent judiciary, representative government, and the free press--i.e., all the hallmarks of democracy. Against this, Applebaum suggests, it behooves the democratic nations of the world to band together in mutual support precisely because "their democracies are not safe." One means of support would be to reject news that comes from the likes of Russia Today and Xinhua, which inform so much antidemocratic dissension in the "free world," and instead insist on reliable information. Exactly how this is to be achieved isn't quite clear, but it's a worthy idea, as is the suggestion that increased policing of kleptocratic antics and their enablers--not least "the bankers in Sioux Falls happy to accept mystery deposits from mystery clients"--is needed.

Central to any discussion of modern totalitarianism.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Applebaum, Anne: AUTOCRACY, INC." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A797463327/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=0cfe697c. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024.

QUOTED: "Autocracy, Inc. is a valuable book for many reasons, but the focus on illicit wealth creation and on those in democracies who enable it is especially timely. So is Applebaum's recommendation that we wage war on autocratic behaviors wherever they occur."

Byline: Ruth Ben-Ghiat

"Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World"

By Anne Applebaum

Doubleday. 207 pp. $27

- - -

"If you have a smart president, they're not enemies," former president Donald Trump said about Russia, China and North Korea at a campaign rally in Chesapeake, Va., last month. "You'll make them do great." Trump has a habit of praising individual dictators, with Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un at the top of his list. On this occasion, Trump referred to these countries together, as an autocratic alliance that he would seemingly promote if he were to be reelected.

The recent ascendance of global authoritarianism has produced many studies of strongmen, their cults of personality, and the way they use propaganda, violence and other tools of iron rule. Historian and journalist Anne Applebaum has long chronicled the devastation of past authoritarian regimes as well as the threats we face in the present, in books such as the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Gulag" (2003) and "Twilight of Democracy" (2020). Her new book, "Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World," takes a different approach than most, looking at the connections among authoritarian regimes that "opportunistically work together toward their common goal: damaging democracies and democratic values, inside their own countries and around the world."

Applebaum argues that dictators like those in Iran, Venezuela, China and Russia differ from despots of earlier ages because their partnerships are born less from ideological commonalities than from "a ruthless, single-minded determination to preserve their personal wealth and power." Applebaum rightly places kleptocratic institutionalized thievery at the center of her analysis. "To stay in power, modern autocrats need to be able to take money and hide it without being bothered by political institutions that encourage transparency, accountability, or public debate," she writes. "The money, in turn, helps them shore up the instruments of repression."

The "Inc." in her title gestures at those financial priorities. "Governance" becomes a source of illicit wealth for ruling elites (as when Putin plunders Gazprom, the state-owned gas giant, and other entities and exfiltrates the money to offshore accounts), and "foreign policy" prioritizes the deals that keep that wealth flowing. In "mafia states" like North Korea and Russia, organized crime - here meaning crime organized by the government - is the primary activity.

The book explores the many ways autocrats collaborate to keep themselves collectively in power. Repression, indoctrination and thievery are the focus of their joint ventures. They often arm one another (Venezuela gets weapons from China, and Russia gets weapons from Iran and Turkey) and collaborate on acts of violence against exiled dissidents. Regimes also work together through mutual propaganda, whether it is China offering a boost to the state-controlled Russia Today or Russian troll farms amplifying the messages of far-right governments and parties abroad. Such networks have resulted in the standardization of talking points about demographic threats from non-White immigrants and Muslims, and the threat posed to tradition by LGBTQ+ individuals. "Antidemocratic rhetoric has gone global," Applebaum writes.

These intertwined autocratic enterprises collectively aspire to take down the democratic international order, which levies punishments against them that include economic sanctions, anti-corruption legislation, embargoes and International Criminal Court rulings. These practices can restrict state theft, curb trade and travel, and freeze external funding, potentially causing popular unrest at home. Applebaum discusses how China and Russia, in particular, seek to "rewrite the rules of the international system" to discredit threatening ideas promoting human rights and political rights, along with democratic notions of accountability, transparency and solidarity.

These autocrats have adopted the buzzword "multipolarity" to frame the emerging autocratic international order, and the term pervades earnest-seeming talk by Chinese, Venezuelans, Iranians and Russians about "the right to development," "mutual respect," "sovereignty" and "self-determination." Multipolarity positions these murderous regimes - even Russia, despite its war of occupation in Ukraine - as crusaders for justice against globalist manipulations and democratic imperialism, with America the ringleader to be defeated.

Applebaum might overstate the novelty of autocrats colluding for profit rather than ideology. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, hundreds of Italian fascists traveled to Russia to learn from the communists about Stalin's Five-Year Plan. And the Holocaust was one of the biggest multinational criminal operations in history; it attracted profiteer-collaborators who may not have cared about "the Jewish question" but wanted to make money.

Applebaum also contends that it is myopic and dated to focus on "a bad man at the top" - a strongman - because today's autocracies are run by networks and infrastructures of transnational reach. Yet Putinism and other personalist regimes show that when dictators achieve a certain level of power, they are the ones who determine who gets to participate in and profit from those networks. And it can be difficult to dislodge the "bad man at the top," as Putin's lasting power demonstrates.

"Autocracy, Inc." is a valuable book for many reasons, but the focus on illicit wealth creation and on those in democracies who enable it is especially timely. So is Applebaum's recommendation that we wage war on autocratic behaviors wherever they occur. That requires a united front among democratic countries to stop "lawless violence," enforce sanctions and debunk propaganda - including inside their borders.

These are tall orders in our current environment, and particularly urgent recommendations for America in particular, because we are also part of the problem. The wealth managers, international lawyers and accountants whom dictators employ live in democracies - principally in Britain and the United States - as do the public relations firms and lobbyists who whitewash their crimes. Many Americans probably do not know that South Dakota, Wyoming and other U.S. states are now important hubs of kleptocratic activities.

Trump is not a protagonist of this book, but he has probably long been part of the illicit capital flows that Applebaum examines. Autocracies funneled millions to Trump's businesses while he was president, with China alone providing more than $5 million. Trump also shares the mentality of those transactional tyrants. "Dictators? It's okay. Come on in. Whatever's good for the United States," he declared in 2019. Trump may have worn a MAGA hat at his Virginia rally, but his belief that a "smart president" could help China, North Korea and Russia "do great" implies that the forces Applebaum describes would expand to include America during a second Trump term.

- - -

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HOST: MARY LOUISE KELLY

MARY LOUISE KELLY: Consider the date June 4, 1989. In Poland, they held partially free elections. Street protests followed calling for free speech, due process and democracy. Well, those protests spread and eventually removed communists from power in Poland and neighboring countries, and within a few years, the Soviet Union ceased to be. OK. Same date, June 4, 1989 - in China, the Communist Party ordered the military to remove student protesters from Tiananmen Square. Those students were calling for the same things - free speech, due process, democracy. Soldiers arrested and killed protesters, and the crackdown that followed focused on eliminating not just people, but the ideas that had motivated the protesters.

KELLY: Consider the date June 4, 1989. In Poland, they held partially free elections. Street protests followed calling for free speech, due process and democracy. Well, those protests spread and eventually removed communists from power in Poland and neighboring countries, and within a few years, the Soviet Union ceased to be. OK. Same date, June 4, 1989 - in China, the Communist Party ordered the military to remove student protesters from Tiananmen Square. Those students were calling for the same things - free speech, due process, democracy. Soldiers arrested and killed protesters, and the crackdown that followed focused on eliminating not just people, but the ideas that had motivated the protesters.

Well, the writer Anne Applebaum deploys those two narratives at the top of her latest cover story for The Atlantic. It's headlined "Democracy Is Losing The Propaganda War." Anne, welcome.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: Thank you.

KELLY: So the thrust of this piece is about how autocratic regimes have turned their repressive tactics outward toward the West, toward democracies. And you write, quote, "if people are naturally drawn to the image of human rights, to the language of democracy, to the dream of freedom, then those concepts have to be poisoned." Start there. Is that really what you see countries like China trying to do?

KELLY: So the thrust of this piece is about how autocratic regimes have turned their repressive tactics outward toward the West, toward democracies. And you write, quote, "if people are naturally drawn to the image of human rights, to the language of democracy, to the dream of freedom, then those concepts have to be poisoned." Start there. Is that really what you see countries like China trying to do?

APPLEBAUM: Yes, it is, and it's something that has increased in recent years. So I think after Tiananmen and in the early days of the internet, the Chinese did focus hard on controlling the conversation inside their own country. But as time has gone on, as they understand that there are limits to how much they can control the ideas, they've also begun to develop a narrative about the danger of democracy. So it's not just that we're not going to let you discuss, you know, what goes on inside our country. We're also going to talk about how bad democracy functions everywhere else. And we're going to do that not only in China, but they've also begun to do it in Africa, in Latin America, and even more recently, inside the United States. And around the same time, the Russians came to a similar conclusion.

KELLY: Just to jump in, I mean, this is not entirely new. What you're arguing in this piece is that what is new is the convergence of what had been, you know, disparate authoritarian influence projects in China, in Russia, other places. What we're seeing now is China aligning its goals with Russia, for example.

KELLY: Just to jump in, I mean, this is not entirely new. What you're arguing in this piece is that what is new is the convergence of what had been, you know, disparate authoritarian influence projects in China, in Russia, other places. What we're seeing now is China aligning its goals with Russia, for example.

APPLEBAUM: So for many years, the Chinese have, of course, had a communication strategy. They've spoken about China as a great success story. They've sought to make sure that other countries agree with them on the questions they care about, about Tibet and Taiwan. They've also invested a lot of money into selling and making sure that people hear those messages. They've spent billions of dollars creating a network of television stations, radio stations, websites in Africa, in Latin America, across Asia. They have content-sharing agreements with many local, national and other media outlets.

But more recently, what we see is them using that same network not only to promote their ideas about themselves, but also, for example, to echo Russian propaganda about Ukraine - so that the Ukrainians are Nazis, for example, or that the United States is building dangerous biological weapons factories in Ukraine and that that was one explanation for the invasion or for the war. You know, this is a made-up conspiracy theory. And we see them converging around the idea that authoritarian countries are safe and secure, that democracies are divided and degenerate, and above all, that the United States is a special danger to the world.

KELLY: You just used the word echo, Anne. And I'm curious - is it just an echo, or is this a more coordinated strategy? Like are these policies evolving in sync?

KELLY: You just used the word echo, Anne. And I'm curious - is it just an echo, or is this a more coordinated strategy? Like are these policies evolving in sync?

APPLEBAUM: So I don't think that there's a secret room where, you know, autocratic leaders sit down like in a "James Bond" movie and they all agree about what they're going to say. I don't think it works like that. I think it's more that their strategies and their thinking have converged. They have concluded that the ideas of democracy that are in circulation that impact all of their domestic opposition - so whether it's the Hong Kong democracy movement or whether it's the Navalny movement in Russia or the women's movement in Iran, they see that those movements are inspired by outside ideas. And so they have concluded that they need to carry this fight around the world.

KELLY: So let's dig in on one example of how this is playing out. You describe in the piece a dinner party that you were at in Munich last year. You were seated with a European diplomat who was just back from Africa.

KELLY: So let's dig in on one example of how this is playing out. You describe in the piece a dinner party that you were at in Munich last year. You were seated with a European diplomat who was just back from Africa.

APPLEBAUM: Very perplexed by the fact that he'd met all these young people in Africa who believed Russian narratives about Ukraine - this was specifically about Ukraine - and who were saying Ukrainians are Nazis, that the war is the United States' fault. And he was really shocked because, of course, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a colonial war. And you would think that countries that have a strong anti-colonial philosophy would support the Ukrainians.

This is what people are hearing. This is what they hear on their own national radio stations and television stations, which have these content-sharing agreements with China. This is what they read on the internet in social media that's very influenced by Russian influence campaigns there, and they don't much hear the counterarguments, and they don't hear them coming from their own media in the way that, you know, we would hope, and they don't hear them much coming from us.

KELLY: In a section of your piece that begins, here is a difficult truth, you discuss the role that Americans play. What is it?

KELLY: In a section of your piece that begins, here is a difficult truth, you discuss the role that Americans play. What is it?

APPLEBAUM: So there is a part of American political culture, and in particular, it's a part of the Republican Party that isn't merely influenced by authoritarian narratives, but it creates them and repeats them and spreads them deliberately. And we've seen that in the last couple of years very prominently with the rise of a pro-Russian part of the party, with the visit of Tucker Carlson, you know, the former Fox News host, to Moscow to do a kind of sycophantic interview with Vladimir Putin.

But I think it goes deeper than that. I think the use of this narrative promoting authoritarianism and attacking democracy is useful for people who also want to change the way the American political system works, and that is now the goal of a part of the party. And so the narrative about democracy being degenerate, the decline of values, the rise of chaos, the use of chaotic photographs and narratives in social media and on television - I mean, all of that, those are tactics that are known to be used in Russia and China, and they are now used by Americans in the United States. So it's - there's not an influence operation. They're doing the same thing.

KELLY: And all that is happening while we have a society, an environment where a lot more Americans are distrustful of institutions. So does anybody know what to do about this or have a proposal? And what should the U.S. do if all that you have documented in this piece is true?

KELLY: And all that is happening while we have a society, an environment where a lot more Americans are distrustful of institutions. So does anybody know what to do about this or have a proposal? And what should the U.S. do if all that you have documented in this piece is true?

APPLEBAUM: There are a wide range of things we could be doing. We could have a serious conversation about regulation of social media. We could be promoting American narratives and American arguments around the world in a way that we haven't wanted to do in the last several decades. But above all, we have to recognize it as a problem. And we have to understand that there's nothing automatic about democracy. There's no reason why everybody will accept it or why it's automatically considered to be better everywhere and that if we still believe that our system works and if we want to promote it, we need to make that argument.

KELLY: Anne Applebaum is a staff writer at The Atlantic. Thank you.

KELLY: Anne Applebaum is a staff writer at The Atlantic. Thank you.

APPLEBAUM: Thank you.

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"Autocracies are pushing propaganda against democracy itself, says 'Atlantic' writer." All Things Considered, 9 May 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A793270620/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=0866546f. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024.

Matthews, Owen. "The hunger." Spectator, vol. 335, no. 9865, 23 Sept. 2017, pp. 30+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A524611555/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=891f4b06. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024. Hochschild, Adam. "Clash of Nationalisms." The New York Times Book Review, 22 Oct. 2017, p. 16(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A510766539/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ec701e19. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024. Sebestyen, Victor. "Hunger games: Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine." New Statesman, vol. 146, no. 5395, 1 Dec. 2017, p. 39. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A520322412/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b9a24164. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024. Stuttaford, Andrew. "The Red Broom." National Review, vol. 69, no. 22, 27 Nov. 2017, pp. 42+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A514616959/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e55dce83. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024. Nash, Jonathan. "Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism." Uluslararasi Iliskiler / International Relations, vol. 19, no. 76, winter 2022, pp. 101+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A743216479/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ea370b7f. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024. Ganev, Venelin I. "Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends." Society, vol. 59, no. 1, Feb. 2022, pp. 86+. Gale General OneFile, dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12115-022-00679-y. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024. Nelson, Fraser. "Falling out over staying in: How Brexit divided the political and media elites." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 6139, 27 Nov. 2020, p. 7. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A646304532/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4c04d8f5. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024. Teubner, Jonathan D. "Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism." The Hedgehog Review, vol. 22, no. 3, fall 2020, pp. 134+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A645242024/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=13e3a384. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024. "Applebaum, Anne: AUTOCRACY, INC." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A797463327/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=0cfe697c. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024. Ben-Ghiat, Ruth. "The scariest thing dictators are doing now: Working together." Washington Post, 15 July 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A801407251/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=be041a66. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024. "Autocracies are pushing propaganda against democracy itself, says 'Atlantic' writer." All Things Considered, 9 May 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A793270620/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=0866546f. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024.

• London Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/jul/17/autocracy-inc-by-anne-applebaum-review-the-devil-you-know
  Word count: 1209

  QUOTED: "Applebaum offers a masterclass in the marriage of dodgy government to international criminality."
  :Anne Applebaum, as anyone familiar with her writing will know, is well-positioned to catalogue this new age of autocracy. Like her, Autocracy, Inc. is clear-sighted and fearless."

  Autocracy, Inc. by Anne Applebaum review – the devil you know
  This article is more than 1 month old
  A masterful guide to the new age of authoritarianism

  John Simpson
  Wed 17 Jul 2024 02.30 EDT
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  Until around 2015, I tended to be moderately positive about the world. There were far more democracies than when I started at the BBC in 1966, I would tell myself, and markedly fewer dictatorships. Africa and Latin America, once host to so many military dictatorships, were now mostly run by elected leaders. The terrible threat of nuclear war had receded. A billion people were being lifted out of poverty. Yes, what Vladimir Putin had done in Crimea in 2014 was worrying, and Xi Jinping was starting to make disturbing speeches about Muslims and Uyghurs; but given that I’d seen Soviet communism melt away across eastern Europe and in Russia itself, I still felt there was reason for optimism.

  That pretty much ended in 2016. Brexit damaged the European project, and Donald Trump shook the columns of American leadership. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, based on the completely false assumption that most Ukrainians would welcome the return of Russian domination, and China’s ruthless suppression of political freedom in Hong Kong have darkened the 2020s much as German, Italian and Japanese intervention darkened the 1930s. And the tide of democracy has turned. Elections have so often become shams. Corruption in government has turned into a major global industry. Well-intentioned but indigent governments welcome Chinese cash because no one else will supply it, and pretend not to notice the strings attached – or even welcome them. Populist movements well up in countries that have traditionally been moderate and calm.

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  And so the kind of neo-Whig version of history, which taught that trade would bring us all closer together and economics would make war impossible, has collapsed. China, you might have thought, would see peace as essential for its brand of capitalist-Marxism-Leninism to thrive. Yet you only have to read Bill Clinton, speaking in 2000, to realise how very unrealistic that idea has become: “Growing interdependence will have a liberating effect in China … Computers and the internet, fax machines and photocopiers, modems and satellites all increase the exposure to people, ideas and the world beyond China’s borders.” It would be as hard for governments to control the internet, he famously added, as it would be to nail Jell-O to a wall.

  But instead of the technology mastering the autocrats, the autocrats have learned to master the technology. In this new age of autocracy, men like Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Narendra Modi and Viktor Orbán run entire countries according to their own personal political interest, recharged from time to time by carefully manipulated elections; though last month the voters of India unexpectedly refused to give Modi the majority he needed. Meanwhile the US, whose opinion used to matter just about everywhere on Earth, suddenly seems as intimidating as a scarecrow in a beet field.

  Applebaum offers a masterclass in the marriage of dodgy government to international criminality
  Anne Applebaum, as anyone familiar with her writing will know, is well-positioned to catalogue this new age of autocracy. Like her, Autocracy, Inc. is clear-sighted and fearless. I remember disagreeing with her genteelly at editorial meetings in the early 1990s, when she was writing about the danger that Russia’s post-communist implosion would one day present for the west, after Boris Yeltsin left office. She talked even then about the need for Nato to build up its defences against the time when Russia would be resurgent; while I, having spent so much time in the economic devastation of Moscow and St Petersburg, thought the best way for the west to protect itself was by being far more generous and welcoming towards Russia. Events have shown which of us was right, and it wasn’t me.

  Autocracy, Inc. is deeply disturbing; it couldn’t be anything else. But Applebaum’s research is as always thoroughgoing, which makes it a lively pleasure to read. When she writes about Zimbabwe, for instance, she uncovers a weird and shocking cast of characters to explain the degree to which a potentially wealthy country has been devastated by unthinkably bad government; including the presidential envoy and ambassador-at-large Uebert Angel. Angel, a British-Zimbabwean and evangelical pastor, teaches “the fundamental aspects of becoming a millionaire”; his personal assistant, another Brit called Pastor Rikki, can allegedly get you a face-to-face meeting with President Mnangagwa for a couple of hundred thou. Rikki was shown on camera promising this to an undercover reporter for Al Jazeera, though he states that the resulting documentary was “brutally edited to portray a false narrative”. Skilfully, Applebaum shows how important a financial entrepôt like Dubai is in promoting the interests of governments such as Zimbabwe, and how it facilitates China’s growing financial control over countries which, left alone by the west, are available for sale or hire.

  This is more in the nature of an extended essay about the way the world is going than a major study, but it is a masterclass in the marriage of dodgy government to international criminality. Applebaum is particularly good on information-laundering outfits, “typosquatters” which have the appearance of real, dependable outfits (Reuters.cfd instead of Reuters.com, Spiegel.pr not Spiegel.de). These pump out savagely pro-Russian material, which people read on social media and pass on: for instance the fake press release last year which announced that Nato was going to use Ukrainian troops in France to deal with pension protesters. Obviously false, but it still led to smashed windows and broken bones. The Jell-O is firmly stuck to the wall.

  It’s a disturbing world we live in, but understanding its ways, keeping our own counsel, and knowing who to trust have never been so important. Anne Applebaum, who 30 years ago foresaw the way we were going, is one of those we can trust.

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  John Simpson is the BBC’s world affairs editor. His BBC Two programme, Unspun World, will return in the autumn. Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World is published by Allen Lane (£20). To support the Guardian and the Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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