Anne Applebaum’s reflections on the anti-democratic pandemic sweeping our world offer an extraordinary mix of personal witness and dispassionate historical analysis. A respected conservative author, Applebaum used to enjoy long dinner parties with some of our age’s most gifted right-leaning intellectuals, from Washington to Warsaw; now many of them serve illiberal strongmen and she cringes when she catches sight of them, elated when they cross the street first. But Applebaum also endeavours to figure out what drove these smart people to serve leaders who crush the freedoms that should be a requirement for intellectual labour. For their part, readers will ask whether Applebaum’s former friends help us understand our predicament: that citizens from Poland to California line up to vote men into office who detest the democratic way of life.
Applebaum got interested in dictatorship as an undergraduate at Yale in the early 1980s, inspired by the charismatic political scientist and former communist Wolfgang Leonhard. During college, Applebaum studied Russian in Leningrad and afterwards took up residence in Poland, occasionally smuggling in underground literature, but also filing news reports on what turned out to be communism’s twilight.
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