Peace Prize winner Anne Applebaum: A voice against autocrats

Anne Applebaum's latest book "Autocracy, Inc." comes just in time to illustrate why her work is being honored in Frankfurt, where she is being honored with the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade on October 20.

The Pulitzer-prize winning author explains in "Autocracy, Inc." how autocratic alliances undermine our democracy — not simply due to tyrants ruling from above, but also through networks cooperating behind the scenes in areas such as technology, economy, military and diplomacy. 

Anne Applebaum is renowned as a key analyst of the Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin and his invasion of Ukraine. Her books about the Soviet gulags and the Holodomor, the Stalin-era famine, are already classics of popular history. And Applebaum has long ago warned of Putin's imperialistic cravings.

DW met the author in Frankfurt. The war in Ukraine, she says, will only end when Putin recognizes Ukraine's sovereignty. Or when internal Russian forces turn against him — Applebaum has observed signs that this might currently be happening. A diplomatic solution to the war in Ukraine is not an option for her at the moment. Anyone who relies on this and therefore refuses to support Ukraine is making a big mistake, she adds.

A critical perspective beyond Eastern Europe

Anne Applebaum was born to a Jewish family in Washington DC in 1964. She studied Russian history and literature at Yale and international relations at the London School of Economics.

She started her journalistic career in 1988 as a foreign correspondent in Poland. Working for The Economist magazine, she witnessed the end of the Iron Curtain and covered the fall of the Berlin Wall as a reporter.

Since then, she has written for numerous international media outlets and taught at the most renowned universities.

She is married to the Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, and has obtained Polish citizenship in 2013. Sikorski has worked as a journalist before entering politics, and is seen as a moderate conservative, a description which could be applied to Applebaum as well.

Her critical insight is not limited to Eastern Europe — for many years, Applebaum has been monitoring the rise of enemies of democracy across the world, including Putin, Donald Trump and the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as well as regimes in Iran or China. Appelbaum sees the leaders of all those leaders as populists with autocratic tendencies who threaten democracy.

How autocratic regimes undermine democracy

The West, she tells DW, has too long relied on the slogan of change through economic trade without reacting to the threat of autocratic networks fully committed to creating an alternative system. It is high time that democratic states counteract this, by uniting against disinformation and against opaque financial transactions. 

The view of today's world presented by Anne Applebaum is not a reassuring one.

But these modern-day autocrats still have an enemy: "That enemy is us. To be more precise, that enemy is the democratic world," she writes.

"In a time when democratic achievements and values are increasingly being caricatured and attacked, her work is an eminently important contribution to the preservation of democracy and peace," the jury of the German Peace Prize said in their decision to honor Applebaum with the prestigious award.

Russian historian Irina Scherbakowa, a founding member of the human rights organization Memorial, will give the laudatory speech at the prize ceremony: "Anne Applebaum is a great enlightener," she told DW.

The €25,000 ($26,730) award was first established by the German Book Trade in 1950, and has since become one of the most prestigious awards in Germany. Recipients are selected for their "commitment to international understanding between peoples and cultures."

This article was originally written in German.