Anne Applebaum — journalist with roots in the Russian Empire
Anne Elizabeth Applebaum was born in Washington, DC, on 25 July 1964, the eldest of three daughters of Harvey M. Applebaum and Elizabeth Applebaum, into a Reform Jewish family. Her connection to the Russian Empire runs through her great-grandparents.
By her own account, they emigrated to North America in the reign of Alexander III, from the territory that is now Belarus, then part of the Empire. In 2025 the Belarusian newspaper Nasha Niva published the results of genealogical research, based on engagement and wedding notices in an Alabama newspaper, that traced the family to Kobryn, in the Grodno Governorate, and dated its departure to the 1890s. Applebaum said in an interview that her family remembered almost nothing of that past, having tried to forget it as quickly as possible; she had passed through Kobryn herself in the early 1990s.
She graduated from Sidwell Friends School in Washington and from Yale, summa cum laude, in history and literature; she spent the summer of 1985 in Leningrad, took a master's degree in international relations at the London School of Economics as a Marshall Scholar, and studied at St Antony's College, Oxford. From 1988 she reported from Warsaw for The Economist, and in November 1989 covered the fall of the Berlin Wall. She later worked for The Spectator, where she was foreign and deputy editor, wrote for the Daily and Sunday Telegraph and Slate, and for more than fifteen years was a columnist and editorial-board member at The Washington Post. She is a staff writer for The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute of Johns Hopkins University.
Her first book, Between East and West, described a journey across Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine in 1991. Gulag: A History (2003), drawing on newly opened archives, memoirs and interviews, won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 2004. Iron Curtain (2012), on the Soviet takeover of Central Europe after 1944, won the Cundill Prize and was a National Book Award finalist; Red Famine (2017), on the Ukrainian famine of 1932–33, won the Lionel Gelber and Duff Cooper prizes. Twilight of Democracy followed in 2020 and Autocracy, Inc. in 2024. That year she received the Carl von Ossietzky Prize and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, presented in Frankfurt's Paulskirche on 20 October.
She holds American and Polish citizenship and has been married since 1992 to the Polish politician Radosław Sikorski.
"Her great-grandparents emigrated to North America in the reign of Alexander III, in the 1880s or 1890s, from what is now Belarus; genealogical research published in 2025 traced them to Kobryn."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Kobryn, Grodno Governorate (now Belarus) — great-grandparents (per genealogical research; her own account: present-day Belarus)
By her own account, her great-grandparents emigrated to North America in the reign of Alexander III from what is now Belarus, then part of the Russian Empire. Genealogical research published by the Belarusian paper Nasha Niva in 2025 traced the family to Kobryn.
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Kobryn, Grodno Governorate (now Belarus) — great-grandparents (per genealogical research; her own account: present-day Belarus). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.