Dr. Yevgenia M. Albats, Editor-in-Chief and CEO of the Moscow-based “New Times” and a radio host with more than 40 years experience with Soviet, Russian and international media, will give a lecture on the rise and fall of the Russian free press over the last 30 years. Despite perestroika and the collapse of the Berlin Wall, censorship has since returned and the once-famous Russian TV networks have turned back into Soviet-style propaganda machines. The few independent media outlets that remain are struggling to survive in the absence of advertising and financial support, while under pressure from the omnipotent state.

Dr. Yevgenia M. Albats is a Russian investigative journalist, political scientist, author and radio host. Since 2007, she has served as Political Editor and is now Editor-in-Chief and CEO of “The New Times,” a Moscow-based, Russian language independent political weekly. The New Times is digital-only as of June of 2017, when Russian authorities severed its distribution and sales.
Since 2004, Dr. Albats has hosted “Absolute Albats,” a talk show on “Echo Moskvy,” the only 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 from 2003 to 2004 and was a full-time professor at the Moscow-based university The Higher School of Economics, where she taught institutional theory of the state and bureaucracy until her courses were canceled at the request of top Kremlin officials in 2011. In 2017 Albats was chosen as an inaugural fellow at Kelly’s Writers House and Perry House at the University of Pennsylvania. Albats is the author of four books, including one on the history of the Russian political police, the KGB, whose graduates are running the country today. Yevgenia Albats is the inaugural International Institute Distinguished Faculty Fellow for 2019-2020 in partnership with the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (CREES) at the University of Michigan.

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