In the East, where my heart beats: Peace Prize for Anne Applebaum

The German Publishers and Booksellers Association awards its Peace Prize in both peaceful and warlike times. But this year’s award could hardly have a more direct impact on the current war than the choice of Anne Applebaum. Her Peace Prize speech in Frankfurt’s Paulskirche at the end of the book fair in October will, as much can be predicted, place the war in Eastern Europe firmly at the center of attention.

Anne Applebaum is close to the war that Russia’s Vladimir Putin has unleashed against Ukraine. She has lived in Poland for two decades and is married to the Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski. She chose her path by studying Russian history and literature at Yale.

In addition to her work as an Eastern European correspondent, which she began in 1988, she became a historian. Her first book, which was immediately awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2003, made her one of the leading authorities on Russian-Soviet history.

Anglo-Saxon narrative tradition

“The Gulag” attempts to provide a comprehensive portrayal of this most horrific chapter of the Soviet past. Not that there hasn’t been a lot of literature on the subject, but in the best Anglo-Saxon tradition, Applebaum succeeded in weaving the presentation of the facts with the story of individual fates in order to make the all-encompassing dimension of Stalinist terror imaginable.

From there, Applebaum, who was in Berlin in 2008 as a Fellow of the American Academy, moved on to the next horror chapter of Soviet history: the Holodomor. This is the name given to the politically caused famine in Ukraine in 1932/33, genocide through hunger.

Applebaum calls her 2017 book Red Hunger “Stalin’s War Against Ukraine” in the subtitle, and as catchy as this formulation is, it points directly to the debates about the nature of this state-enforced catastrophe, which caused between five and seven million people to die of starvation, but claimed well over ten million lives in total.

Hunger as Stalin’s weapon

The hunger was embedded in the entire repertoire of Stalin’s repression of forced collectivization and “dekulakization” of the peasantry. And, as is the consensus in today’s Ukraine, with the deeper motive of the destruction of Ukraine as a nation. But the famine also raged in the Russian heartland and – proportionally in terms of the number of victims even worse – in Kazakhstan.

The controversy surrounding the decidedly anti-Ukrainian nature of Stalin’s policies has reached current politics and the question of Ukraine’s national identity. Accordingly, the foundation board’s justification for awarding the prize states: “In her publications on autocratic state systems and their international networks, Anne Applebaum succeeds in combining historiographical findings with keen observation of the present.

At a time when democratic achievements and values ​​are increasingly being caricatured and attacked, their work becomes an eminently important contribution to the preservation of democracy and peace.”

Hope despite tragedies

This follows, if you will, on Applebaum’s afterword to her book on Ukraine, where she writes: “History contains hope as well as tragedy. Ultimately, Ukraine was not destroyed. The Ukrainian language has not disappeared. The desire for independence has not disappeared either – nor has the desire for democracy, for a just society or for a Ukrainian state that truly represents Ukrainians. (…) When they were allowed to vote, they voted overwhelmingly for independence in 1991.”

It is this perspective, that of a present and future in independence and democracy, in which Anne Applebaum, who has received numerous awards and professorships, has placed her work, and which has also found visible recognition in this country with the Peace Prize.

In her 2020 book The Allure of Authoritarianism, Applebaum examines the crisis of Western liberalism under the rise of authoritarian tendencies. Her work reminds us that real peace is only possible by making history present. This is Anne Applebaum’s lasting achievement.