TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. In the battle between autocracy and democracy, between dictatorship and freedom, Ukraine is now the front line and our front line, writes my guest, Anne Applebaum. She's a journalist and historian who has spent the past few years writing about authoritarian governments focusing on Eastern European countries and their leader's ties to Vladimir Putin. She's been writing about Russia's invasion of Ukraine for The Atlantic, where she's a staff writer. She's also written about the history of conflicts between the Kremlin and Ukraine.
Her book "Red Famine" is about the Famine in Ukraine that was created by Stalin in the early 1930s in his attempt to destroy the Ukrainian national movement. Nearly 4 million Ukrainians died. Soviet secret police simultaneously carried out mass arrests of Ukrainian intellectual, cultural, religious and political leaders, and exiled many of them to remote parts of the Soviet Union. She writes that the famine and its legacy play an enormous role in contemporary Russian and Ukrainian arguments.
Applebaum is also the author of the book "Twilight Of Democracy: The Seductive Lure Of Authoritarianism." She lives in London and Poland. Her husband is a representative in the European Parliament from the Polish opposition party. She's also a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, where she runs a program researching disinformation and polarization. Just a note before we start - because we pre-record our interviews and our show is played at different times of day on different stations, the news may have changed by the time you hear this. But this interview is to help better understand the history behind Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the Ukrainians' fierce resistance.
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