This event will be hosted in person only. RSVP to attend in person. Please RSVP by no later than 9 am on March 12.
The Russian state killed Alexei Navalny. This conclusion was reached by independent laboratories in five European countries and announced at the Munich Security Conference on February 16, the second anniversary of Navalny’s death in Arctic Penal Colony No. 3, known as “Polar Wolf. It was at least the third attempt to poison him—and this final time, it succeeded. Why was Putin so determined to eliminate Navalny? What was it about this leader of the Russian opposition that the dictator feared so deeply? Dr. Yevgenia Albats, a close friend of Navalny for twenty years, offers her answers based on extensive correspondence with him during his final imprisonment from 2021 to 2024.
This event is co-sponsored by the NYU Department of Russian and Slavic Studies.
Yevgenia Albats is a Russian investigative journalist, political scientist, author, and radio host. Since getting her Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University, she has been sharing her life between academia and journalism. She was a professor of political science at the Moscow- based university — The Higher School of Economics, and she was the first professor fired on the request of Kremlin. She has been Editor-in-Chief of the political weekly The New Times since 2007 and a talk show host, Absolute Albats at 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 and Fellow at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies of Harvard. She teaches political science at the Harvard Extension School. She is the author of four independently researched books, including The State Within a State. KGB and Its Hold on Russia: Past, Present & Future. Beginning this autumn she is a Research Professor with the Department of Russian and Slavic studies, working on her new book project.
