Yevgenia M. Albats

Yevgenia M. Albats is a Russian investigative journalist, political scientist, author, and radio host. She was 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 of that, Albats keep running the newtimes.ru, and she keeps reporting from Russia though her readers in Russia has to use the VPN (Virtual private network) in order to read it.

Since 2004, Albats 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 in a week after the war in Ukraine started. Albats moved her talk show Absolute Albats to her YouTube channel that enjoys 104K subscribers now.

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.

She is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) since its founding in 1996. Albats taught at Yale in 2003-2004. She was a full-time professor at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, teaching the institutional theory of the state and bureaucracy, until 2011 when her courses were canceled at the request of top Kremlin officials.

In 2015 Albats was awarded Tuft’s University Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award. In 2017, Albats was chosen as an inaugural fellow at Kelly’s Writers House and Perry House at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2019 — 2020 she taught authoritarian politics at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Albats is the author of the 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 resides in Moscow, Russia.