MIKHAIL ZYGAR is a Russian journalist, writer and filmmaker, and the founding editor-in-chief of Russia’s only independent news TV-channel, Dozhd/TVRain (2010 – 2015). In 2014, Zygar received the CPJ International Press Freedom Award.

Zygar’s bestseller All the Kremlin’s Men (2015) is based on an unprecedented series of interviews with Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, presenting a radically different view of power and politics in Russia. The Time magazine named it ‘one of 9 books to understand Russia’. His book The Empire Must Die (2017) was named a Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year. In February, 2022 after Russia’s invasion to Ukraine Zygar authored a petition against the invasion to Ukraine co-signed by Russia’s most prominent writers, artists and scholars. He left Russia and is labeled as a foreign agent by the Russian government.

His last book War and Punishment «Putin, Zelensky, and the Path to Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine» was listed among NEW YORKER BEST BOOKS OF 2023.

In 2023 Zygar moved to New York. Now he’s Press Freedom Fellow at CUNY Craig Newmark School of Journalism and visiting professor at SPIA, Princeton University.

Photo credit – Nadya Alexandrova