Deconstructing the Iron Curtain: Anne Applebaum in conversation with Professor Geoffrey Hosking (UCL SSEES) around the publication of her latest book, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-56.

Anne Applebaum is an American journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author who has written extensively about communism and the development of civil society in Central and Eastern Europe. She is director of political studies for the Legatum Institute and a columnist for the Washington Post and Slate.  Anne Applebaum took up the post of Philippe Roman Chair in History and International Affairs at the London School of Economics and Political Science in October 2012. She is married to Poland's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Radosław Sikorski.

Geoffrey Hosking is Emeritus Professor of Russian History at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies where he taught for 23 years.  Having worked on the borders of political and cultural history, his attention turned to the “strange and paradoxical situation” of the Russians as the dominant people first in the Russian Empire and then in the Soviet Union. In recent years Professor Hosking has been looking at the question of trust as a social phenomenon generally and specifically in the context of what structures of trust actually existed in Russian/Soviet society.

This event is sponsored by the Polish Cultural Institute London, the Romanian Cultural Institute and Allen Lane.

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