Anne Applebaum wrote the book on autocracy. Then she thanked a sanctioned oligarch at his Oxford school.
On 27 January 2026, Anne Applebaum—Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Autocracy, Inc., a book arguing that autocratic systems survive through elite complicity, selective blindness, and the willingness of respectable institutions to look away—delivered a lecture on autocracy at Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government and publicly thanked the school’s benefactor, Len Blavatnik,Continue Reading











