Join us for another installment in our new series of conversations hosted by Jordan Center Distinguished Journalist in Residence Dr. Yevgenia Albats. Throughout the year, Dr. Albats will be joined by leading experts – journalists, researchers, foreign service officers, and more – in one-on-one, public conversations regarding the most pressing issues in our understanding of Russia today. Be sure to check our website for more information on upcoming events, which will generally take place on Thursdays at 4 pm ET.
Watch the event recording on YouTube here.
Pavel Chikov, PhD, MPA, LLM, is chair of Agora International Human Rights Group. Since 1999 Chikov has been a leading human rights lawyer and head of a number of Russian human rights organizations in Moscow and Kazan. In 2001 he was a founder and first chair of the Kazan Human Rights Centre. In 2004 he moved to work at Open Russia, an NGO based in Moscow. In 2005 Chikov initiated the creation of the AGORA Association – a union of seven local groups of human rights lawyers in Russia. In 2015 he led the creation of the Agora International Human Rights Group. Pavel Chikov has developed model practices for human rights groups in Russia, effectively using advocacy and litigation to combat police abuse, arbitrariness in the military, medical negligence and brutality against prisoners. He has published 17 books and more than 50 articles on various aspects of human rights in Russia, unlawful pressure against human rights activists, police brutality and corruption, compensation for victims of human rights abuse, and the Russian law enforcement system. From 2005-2010, the AGORA Association achieved disciplinary measures or court convictions against more than 250 government officials for human rights abuses, including more than 50 police officers convicted of torture, illegal arrest and corruption. In the same period, Russian media carried more than 20,000 publications on human rights work initiated by the Association and its local partners.
Dr. Yevgenia M. Albats is a Russian investigative journalist, political scientist, author, and radio host. She has been 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 that, Albats contines to run the newtimes.ru, and she kept reporting from Russia until she had to leave the country in the last week of August 2022 after she was fined for her coverage of the war with Ukraine and pronounced a foreign agent. 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 a week after the war in Ukraine started. Albats moved her talk show to her YouTube channel that now has over 100k subscribers. 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 and theory of regimes, until 2011 when her courses were banned at the request of top Kremlin officials. In 2015 Albats was awarded Tufts University’s Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award. In 2017, Albats was chosen as an inaugural fellow at Kelly Writers House and Perry House at the University of Pennsylvania. From 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 claims Moscow, Russia as her home.
