Books by Anne Applebaum – Anne Applebaum

Matka Polka

A book-length interview with Anne Applebaum, conducted by the writer Pawel Potoroczyn, covering her biography, background and views on Poland, Russia, American politics, culture, education and more.

In our turbulent times, we cannot predict what tomorrow will look like. But we know that tomorrow depends on what all of us do today. That is why we have no right to be pessimistic. This is the main argument made by Anne Applebaum and Donald Tusk in this book, a collection of conversations about the most important choices facing Poland, Europe and the world.

Twilight of Democracy

Anne’s newest book THE TWILIGHT OF DEMOCRACY explains, with electrifying clarity, why some of her contemporaries have abandoned liberal democratic ideals in favor of strongman cults, nationalist movements, or one-party states.

Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine

In 1929 Stalin launched his policy of agricultural collectivization—in effect a second Russian revolution—which forced millions of peasants off their land and onto collective farms. The result was a catastrophic famine, the most lethal in European history.

GULAG: A History

GULAG: A HISTORY is a narrative account of the origins and development of the Soviet concentration camps, from Lenin to Gorbachev. Based on archives, interviews, new research and recently published memoirs, the book explains the role that the camps played in the Soviet political and economic system.

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

At the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union unexpectedly found itself in control of a huge swathe of territory in Eastern Europe. Stalin and his secret police set out to convert a dozen radically different countries to a completely new political and moral system: communism.

Gulag Voices: An Anthology

From Anne Applebaum’s Introduction:
“The writers in this volume have one thing in common: All of them were arrested for political crimes in the Soviet Union, and all of them spent years – sometimes many years – in the concentration camp system now known as the Gulag. There, however, their similarities end.”

From a Polish Country House Kitchen

With more than 150 splendid photographs, and more than 90 recipes for classic and contemporary Polish food, this unique cookbook brings an ignored cuisine to light.

Between East and West

Published in 1995, Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe is an account of a journey from the Baltic to the Black Sea, across Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine, made in 1991, just as the Soviet Union was about to break apart. Its main subject is the shifting national identities of the region’s inhabitants – the effects of a century’s worth of shifting borders.