Yevgenia Albats

Yevgenia M. Albats is a Russian investigative journalist, political scientist, author, and radio host. Since 2007 she has been first political editor and then editor-in-chief and CEO of The New Times, a Russian-language independent political weekly originally based in Moscow. In 2004, Albats started hosting "Absolute Albats," a talk-show on Ekho Moskvy (Echo of Moscow), the last remaining liberal radio station in Russia. 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 has been 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 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 courses on authoritarian politics at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. In 2019-2021 she was a senior scholar at the Davis Center, where she returned as a visiting scholar in 2024-2025 to host a new speaker series on Russia's impact on international security and stability. Albats was a Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard in 2023-2024 and is the author of four books, including one on the history of the Russian political police, the KGB, whose alumni are running the country today.