Anne Applebaum Quotes
The dominance of former communists and the insufficient discussion of the past in the post-communist world is not coincidental. To put it bluntly, former communists have a clear interest in concealing the past: it tarnishes them, undermines them, hurts their claims to be carrying out . . . Read more

-Anne Applebaum
Before a nation can be rebuilt, its citizens need to understand how it was destroyed in the first place: how its institutions were undermined, how its language was twisted, how its people were manipulated.

-Anne Applebaum
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If the Russian people and the Russian elite remembered - viscerally, emotionally remembered - what Stalin did to the Chechens, they could not have invaded Chechnya in the 1990s, not once and not twice. To do so was the moral equivalent of postwar Germany invading western Poland. Very . . . Read more

-Anne Applebaum
the Polish Institute of National Memory estimates that there were some 5.5 million wartime deaths in the country, of which about 3 million were Jews. In total, some 20 percent of the Polish population, one in five people, did not survive.

-Anne Applebaum
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Totalitarian regimes, they declared, all had at least five things in common: a dominant ideology, a single ruling party, a secret police force prepared to use terror, a monopoly on information, and a planned economy. By those criteria, the Soviet and Nazi regimes were not the only tot . . . Read more

-Anne Applebaum
Although the definition of an 'enemy of the state' changed over time, the mechanisms to deal with these enemies were put in place right at the very beginning.

-Anne Applebaum
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Those who can walk will walk. Protest or not—all will walk. Those who can’t walk—we will shoot.

-Anne Applebaum
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This “success” had a political price, in Hungary as everywhere else. In practice, nationalization had very little effect on the daily lives of ordinary workers: they were paid the same wages, did the same work, had the same grievances. What difference did it make if their foremen . . . Read more

-Anne Applebaum