Anne Applebaum is an American-Polish journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author who writes extensively on communism and the development of civil society in Central and Eastern Europe. She is the director of the Transitions Forum at the Legatum Institute in London and is an adjunct fellow of the Center for European Policy Analysis. Applebaum is a columnist for The Washington Post and Slate and served as an editor for The Economist. In 2012, she published Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956, which describes the imposition of Soviet totalitarianism in Central Europe after World War II. Her previous book, Gulag: A History, was published in 2003 and won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction the following year. The book narrates the history of the Soviet concentration camps system and extensively draws upon Russian archives, memoirs, and interviews. Applebaum has lectured at many of the world’s most prestigious universities and held the Phillipe Roman Chair of History and International Relations at the London School of Economics from 2012 to 2013.