Applebaum Warns of New Global Political Threat

Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, Anne Applebaum, has spent the better part of her career writing about the history of political repression. In “Gulag,” which won her America’s top prize in journalism in 2004, she chronicled, in more than a thousand pages, the brutal Soviet prison system.

Eight years later, she wrote another 1,000-page work about how democracy was snuffed out in Eastern Europe in the decade following the Second World War. That book was a finalist for the National Book Award. Finally, she authored a critically acclaimed volume on Stalin’s brutally repressive campaign to collectivize agriculture in the Ukraine in the early 1930s.

In her decades-long immersion in the study of all this political violence in the 20th century, she came to know many of the present-day political activists in Russia and elsewhere. She used that to write two slender books about autocratic governments in the 21st century.

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Her “Autocracy, Inc – The Dictators Who Want to Run The World” was the subject of a discussion last month at the Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta (MJCCA). Coincidentally, a second work by Applebaum appeared, “Twilight of Democracy – The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism.” She talked about her interest in the subject with Greg Bluestein, chief political writer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

After the program, Applebaum signed copies of her five books, including her Pulitzer Prize winner.

“I spent a lot of time with people who are dissidents,” Applebaum said, “people who live in Russia or who live in Iran, or who work on projects and connect. I have a group of friends who have been working very hard to change Venezuela, and I realized over a number of years that I was learning a lot from them about the systems they oppose.”

She has studied the common goals that link perhaps as many as three dozen autocratic regimes around the world. They are loosely connected, not by political ideology but by their opposition to democracy and their desire to enhance the power they enjoy over their people.

They may be in a nationalist, capitalist state like Russia under Vladimir Putin or a left-wing socialist regime like Nicholas Maduro’s Venezuela or a theocracy like the Islamic Republic of Iran.

What all these nations have in common, Applebaum says, is their aversion to democracy. This was particularly true in China, which has flirted with a more open society in the past, and in Russia, which experienced a more liberal society after the fall of communism. Today, she says, that has changed.

The lecture was sponsored by the family of Dr. Charles and Bunny Rosenberg.

“Gradually, they realized that these democratic ideas were dangerous to them,” Applebaum points out, “and they began shutting them off. And they began working on creating autocratic narratives that would undermine democracy. They began looking for ways to undermine the democratic world, militarily and in other ways as well.”

The leaders of all these nations don’t gather around a conference table to plot their subversion of democracy. The world she describes is less a James Bond-like movie and more like a loosely knit informal club whose members all share a desire to put down dissent within their borders and enhance their power in the world, any way possible.

They sometime may provide economic help to one another, as when Russia helped to prop up the bankrupt Venezuelans or when North Korea exchanges information about rocketry with Iran, or when China exports its crowd control hardware and its computer surveillance software to other repressive regimes.

These nations also support each other, Applebaum notes, with propaganda or disinformation on social media when it is useful, as in their support of Russia’s war in Ukraine. What they have achieved, she believes, is a serious challenge to world order.

Applebaum, who is a staff writer for The Atlantic and has been on the editorial board of The Washington Post, was asked how she thought the new administration was responding to these authoritarian challenges in the world.

“We do have,” she says, “for the first time, a president whose less sure that he wants this country to be the leader of the democratic world. We are pulling back from that, and we are changing the kind of language that we use on the world stage.”

Applebaum’s appearance here is the first in a new series of lectures to honor the memory of Dr. Charles Rosenberg and his wife, Bunny. The couple’s son, I.J. Rosenberg, a well-known, former sportswriter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, introduced Applebaum.

He indicated that the lecture series would continue this fall at The Book Festival of the MJCCA. Applebaum, who grew up in Washington, where her father is a prominent lawyer, is directly related to the Rosenberg family here, many of whom attended the lecture. Prior to her talk, she renewed family friendships at a VIP reception and afterwards signed copies of her new book.