Ivan Krastev on Anne Applebaum

“Applebaum’s political identity was made by her admiration for the moral courage of East European dissidents and her belief in the potential of the United States to make the world a better place.”

“[The fall of the Berlin Wall in] 1989 was the point of departure of everything that Applebaum did in the following three decades. Her much-praised history books about the Soviet Gulag and the establishment of the communist regimes in Central Europe were her historical introduction to the inevitability of 1989. For her, the end of the Cold War was not a geopolitical story; it was a moral story, a verdict pronounced by history itself.”

“In her worldview, the marriage between democracy and capitalism was made in heaven, and most of the conflicts in the world were not about a clash of interests but about a clash of values. It was this mindset that made many ’89ers first to detect the danger coming from Vladimir Putin’s Russia but also the last to condemn George W. Bush’s ugly war in Iraq.”