2025-26 Lunn Lecture: Anne Applebaum

The annual Eugene Lunn Memorial Lecture will be delivered by Pulitzer prize-winning historian and journalist Anne Applebaum on Monday, February 9, 2026 from 4-6 pm at the Manetti Shrem Art Museum. The event (including reception) is free and open to the public.

Her talk, “Autocracy, Inc. — or Democrats United?” is based on her most recent book, the best selling Autocracy, Inc. (2025): “All of us have in our minds a cartoon image of what an autocratic state looks like. There is a bad man at the top. He controls the army and the police. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents. But in the 21st century, that cartoon bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy, but by sophisticated national and transnational networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, security services, and professional propagandists. They don’t share an ideology, but they do have a common goal: to defeat the ideas and language of liberal democracy, inside their own countries and around the world. This lecture will examine this network and describe how it has shaped the world – and the United States.”