Speaking truth to power in Russia

Yevgenia Albats is a Russian investigative journalist, radio host, political scientist, and author. More importantly, she’s a long-time, outspoken critic of the Russian government and its domination by the security services. Albats was awarded a 2022 Tällberg-SNF-Eliasson Global Leadership Prize not only because of her courageous journalism, but also because of her determination to lead by example in resisting authoritarian rule.

She has been Political Editor and then Editor-in-Chief and CEO of The New Times, a Moscow-based, Russian language independent political weekly, since 2007. On February 28, 2022, Vladimir Putin blocked its website, just days after Russia invaded Ukraine. Despite that, Albats keeps running the newtimes.ru, and she kept reporting from Russia until she had to leave the country in the last week of August 2022 after she was fined for her coverage of the war in Ukraine and pronounced a foreign agent.   

Since 2004, Albats has hosted Absolute Albats, a talk show on Echo Moskvy, which was 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 Absolute Albats to her YouTube channel which enjoys 121K subscribers now. 

For the 2022-2023 academic year, Yevgenia is the “Distinguished Journalist in Residence” at New York University’s Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia and a lecturer in political science for the spring semester. 

In 2015 Albats was awarded Tufts University’s Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award. In 2017, Albats was chosen as an inaugural fellow at Kelly Writers House and Perry House at the University of Pennsylvania. Albats was an Alfred Friendly Press Fellow assigned to the Chicago Tribune in 1990, and a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1993.

She is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) since its founding in 1996.

Yevgenia graduated from Moscow State University in 1980 and received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University in 2004. 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. Albats taught at Yale from 2003-2004.

Albats is the author of four independently researched books, including one on the history of the Russian political police, the KGB, whose graduates are running the country today.

She has a daughter and claims Moscow, Russia as her home.