An Evening with Anne Applebaum

The Dr. Charles and Bunny Rosenberg Jewish Speaker Series Presents

Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author and Historian

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

Author Talk, Q & A with Greg Bluestein, Political Reporter, Atlanta Journal Constitution

Following the event, Ms. Applebaum will be signing her most recent book, Autocracy Inc.

6:00 pm VIP Hors d'oeuvres and Cocktail Reception with Anne Applebaum: $144 includes one ticket to the event

7:30 pm Speaker Event, Tickets $20 - 25

Pulitzer Prize winning historian, journalist, commentator on geopolitics and acclaimed keynote, Anne Applebaum, examines the challenges and opportunities of global political and economic change through the lenses of world history and the contemporary political landscape. informed by her expertise in Europe and her years of international reporting, Applebaum shares perspectives on, and the far-reaching implications of, today’s volatile world events. And as technology allows a new scale of media manipulation to authoritarian governments and changes the tenor of political discourse, she scrutinizes the misinformation, propaganda, and criminal exploitation that influence global affairs, as well.

Autocracy, Inc. is a look into what we may think we know what an autocratic state looks like: There is an all-powerful leader at the top. He controls the police. The police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents. But in the 21st century, that bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are underpinned not by one dictator, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, surveillance technologies, and professional propagandists, all of which operate across multiple regimes, from China to Russia to Iran. Corrupt companies in one country do business with corrupt companies in another. The police in one country can arm and train the police in another, and propagandists share resources and themes, pounding home the same messages about the weakness of democracy and the evil of America. International condemnation and economic sanctions cannot move the autocrats. Even popular opposition movements, from Venezuela to Hong Kong to Moscow, don’t stand a chance. The members of Autocracy, Inc, aren’t linked by a unifying ideology, like communism, but rather a common desire for power, wealth, and impunity. In this urgent treatise, which evokes George Kennan’s essay calling for “containment” of the Soviet Union, Applebaum calls for the democracies to fundamentally reorient their policies to fight a new kind of threat.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Anne’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag: A History, is about the Soviet concentration camps. Her book, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine, is the winner of her second Duff Cooper Prize and the 28th Lionel Gelber Prize 2018. In it, Anne proves what many suspected: Stalin set out to destroy the Ukrainian peasantry. Anne is the only author to win the Duff Cooper Prize twice. Her other books include Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1946, which won a Cundill Prize for Historical Literature, and Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe (updated edition published in 2023). She is a Senior Fellow of International Affairs and Agora Fellow in Residence at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC. Director of the Transitions Forum at the Legatum Institute from 2011-2015, an international think tank, Applebaum is the co-founder of the institute’s Democracy Lab, an online partnership between the institute and Foreign Policy magazine. An adjunct fellow of the Center for European Policy Analysis, she is former Philippe Roman Chair in History and International Affairs at the London School of Economics. For many years, Applebaum wrote a biweekly foreign affairs column for The Washington Post which is syndicated internationally. She is now a staff writer at The Atlantic. She has been a contributor to Foreign Affairs, the New Republic, and The New York Review of Books. She was formerly a member of The Washington Post’s editorial board; foreign and deputy editor of the Spectator magazine; and political editor of the Evening Standard. From 1988 – 1991 she covered the collapse of communism as Warsaw correspondent for The Economist. Anne attended Yale University and was a Marshall Scholar at the London School of Economics and St. Antony’s College, Oxford.

Books will be available for purchase from our partner bookseller, A Cappella Books.

(This is not a Book Festival event; Patron Passes are not accepted for this program!)

Schedule

Thursday, April 24, 7:30 pm - 9:30 pm

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