[The fall of the Berlin Wall in] 1989 was the point of departure of everything that Applebaum did in the following three decades.

Her much-praised history books about the Soviet Gulag and the establishment of the communist regimes in Central Europe were her historical introduction to the inevitability of 1989. For her, the end of the Cold War was not a geopolitical story; it was a moral story, a verdict pronounced by history itself.