Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on February 17, 2025 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Harriman Institute for a talk by Yevgenia Albats. Moderated by Valentina Izmirlieva.
Alexei Navalny was the Russian opposition’s leader and the Russian dictator’s primary opponent, Vladimir Putin. He created the Anticorruption Foundation, which served as an umbrella movement and organization of investigators uncovering the corruption of the top Kremlin officials. His documentary about Putin’s luxurious palace on the shore of the Black Sea has gotten 180 million views. In 2020, Navalny was poisoned by the state-produced military-grade poison Novichok. He survived, recovered in Germany, and returned to Moscow in February 2021. He was arrested at the airport and never saw freedom until he was murdered in an Arctic penal colony on February 16, 2024. Yevgenia Albats met Alexei Navalny at the beginning of his political career in 2004. Albats interviewed Navalny numerous times at Echo Moskvy broadcasting and for her magazine, “The New Times.” When Putin incarcerated Navalny in 2021, Albats testified as a character witness at one of the courts inside Navalny’s penal colony. Through three years of Navalny’s imprisonment from 2021 to 2024 and until his death, Albats correspondent intensively with Navalny. She recalled this in her latest piece in The Guardian/Observer: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2024/dec/28/alexei-navalny-remembered-by-yevgenia-albats
Alexei Navalny, “Patriot: A Memoir” ( New York: Knopf Publishing Group, 2024). Barack Obama listed it as a must-read book. The New York Times, The New Yorker, the Atlantic, and NPR long-listed it as the year’s best book.
“Navalny” is a 2022 American documentary film directed by Daniel Rohr and produced by HBO Max and CNN. It won the Best Documentary Feature at the 95th Academy Awards.
Yevgenia Albats is a Russian investigative journalist, political scientist, author, and radio host. She has been sharing her life between academia and journalism since getting her Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University. She was a professor of political science at The Higher School of Economics, and she was the first professor fired at the request of the Kremlin because of her political views. She has been Editor-in-Chief of the political weekly “The New Times” since 2007 and a talk show host of Absolute Albats, and the Russian version of the NPR—Echo Moskvy—until it was taken off the air five days after Russia’s full-scale invasion in Ukraine. Accused of being a “foreign agent working on behalf of Ukraine” and convicted for “spreading disinformation about Russian armed forces” for her coverage of the war in Ukraine, Albats was forced to leave Russia at the end of August 2022 as she was facing an arrest. She taught at NYU from 2022 to 2023, was a Media and Democracy Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School last year, and is now a Visiting Scholar at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies of Harvard. She is the author of four independently researched books.