The Phronesis Program in Politics and Ethics hosts a variety of lectures and visiting faculty. In the 2012-13 academic year Phronesis hosted two lecture series—Economic Crisis: Causes, Consequences, and Remedies and Conservatism and Progressivism in America—as well as several other lectures and seminars. Most recently, the program hosted Anne Applebaum, director for politics at the Legatum Institute in London and professor at the London School of Economics.

True Believers: The Nature of Collaboration and
Opposition in a Totalitarian Regime

Anne Applebaum
April 10, 5 pm, Honors Commons

The horrifying genius of Soviet communism—as conceived in the 1920s, perfected in the 1930s and then spread by force to Soviet-occupied Europe—was the system’s ability to get the silent majority in so many countries to play along without much protest. A small proportion of people protested and a small proportion collaborated. But carefully targeted violence, propaganda, and the state’s monopoly on economic and civic institutions persuaded the rest to go along. These techniques were used to great effect in Eastern Europe after 1945; they are the central topic of this lecture, as well as of Iron Curtain, Anne Applebaum’s new book.

Anne Applebaum is a columnist for the Washington Post and Slate, covering U.S. and international politics. She is also the director for politics at the Legatum Institute in London, and in 2012-2013 will hold the Phillipe Roman chair in History and International Affairs at the London School of Economics. She has previously worked as foreign and deputy editor of the Spectator magazine, as the Warsaw correspondent for the Economist magazine, and as a columnist for the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Telegraph. Between 2001 and 2006 she was a member of the editorial board of the Washington Post. She reviews regularly for the New York Review of Books, the New Republic and the Spectator, and has lectured at Yale, Columbia, the University of Zurich and the Humboldt University in Berlin, among others. Her book, Gulag: A History, won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction, as well as Britain's Duff-Cooper Prize. Gulag has appeared in more than two dozen translations, including all major East and West European languages. Her previous books include Between East and West, a travelogue about Eastern Europe in the early 1990s, and Gulag Voices, an anthology of camp memoirs. Her latest book, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945-1956, will be published in October, 2012. Her husband, Radek Sikorski, is currently the Polish Foreign Minister, and she has two children.