The Atlantic, June 2023

In her book Gulag: A History, Anne Applebaum writes, “The more we are able to understand how different societies have transformed their neighbors and fellow citizens from people into objects, the more we know of the specific circumstances which led to each episode of mass torture and mass murder, the better we will understand the darker side of our own human nature.”

Anne, who received the Pulitzer Prize for Gulag, has made one of her professional preoccupations (to borrow from Robert Burns) man’s inhumanity to man—­specifically, though not exclusively, the in­humanity manifest in Soviet and post-Soviet history. Her book Red Famine is the definitive study of Stalin’s calculated starvation of Ukraine. Anne’s work on that catastrophe prepared her to write about Ukraine’s latest calamity, a calamity whose author is Stalin’s worthy successor. Readers of The Atlantic have benefited from Anne’s erudition, vision, and trenchant writing.