The Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia at the University of Michigan is pleased to present a lecture by Yevgenia Albats on January 27, titled “The Russian Media: 30 Years After the Fall of the Berlin Wall.” Albats is Editor-in-Chief and CEO of The New Times and a radio host with more than 40 years of experience with Soviet, Russian, and international media. In the talk, she will discuss the return of censorship in Russia, where TV networks have turned back into Soviet-style propaganda machines, while the few independent media outlets that remain are struggling to survive.

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 (Echo of Moscow), 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, she 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 Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia at the University of Michigan.

The lecture is co-sponsored by the International Institute and by the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, which is celebrating its 60th anniversary in 2019-20. It is free and open to the public.

Monday, January 27, 2020
5:30-7 PM “The Russian Media: 30 Years After the Fall of the Berlin Wall”
1010 Weiser Hall, 500 Church Street, Ann Arbor

Contact: Mary Elizabeth Malinkin / T: 734.764.0351 / E: malinkin@umich.edu


The Ronald and Eileen Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia (WCEE) supports faculty and student research, teaching, collaboration, and public engagement in studying the institutions, cultures, and histories of these regions. WCEE is comprised of the Center for European Studies (CES); Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (CREES); and Copernicus Center for Polish Studies (CCPS); and works in association with the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies (WCED) at the University of Michigan International Institute. Named in honor of Ronald and Eileen Weiser and inspired by their time in Slovakia during Ambassador Weiser’s service as U.S. ambassador from 2001-04, WCEE began operations in September 2008. For more information, visit ii.umich.edu/wcee.

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