2022 Winner
Yevgenia Albats
for her passionate commitment to reporting truth in the face of repression and corruption, and for forcefully asserting her—and every Russian’s—personal responsibility to work for a democratic future in their country.
Profile
Dr. Yevgenia M. Albats is a Russian investigative journalist, political scientist, author, and radio host. She is currently the Walter Shorenstein Media and Democracy Fellow at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Dr. Albats was an Alfred Friendly Press Fellow assigned to the Chicago Tribune in 1990, and a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1993. She graduated from Moscow State University in 1980 and received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University in 2004. For the 2022-2023 academic year, she was the Distinguished Journalist in Residence at New York University’s Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia and a lecturer in political science.
Since 2004, she has hosted Absolute Albats, a talk show on Echo Moskvy, the only remaining liberal radio station in Russia. The radio station was taken off the air a week after the war in Ukraine started. Albats moved her talk show to her YouTube channel, which enjoys thousands of subscribers. She was a full-time professor at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, teaching the institutional theory of the state and bureaucracy and the theory of regimes, until 2011 when her courses were banned at the request of top Kremlin officials. Despite the dangerous political environment in her home country, Dr. Albats continues to speak truth to power, working toward a democratic future for her homeland. Learn more
