Ekaterina Schulmann

Ekaterina Schulmann is a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin. She is a political scientist specializing in the decision-making and bureaucratic behavior of modern authoritarian regimes with particular emphasis on Russia. Schulmann teaches political science as an associate professor at the Maqsut Narikbayev KAZGUU University in Astana, Kazakhstan.

Prior to joining Carnegie, Schulmann was a Richard von Weizsäcker fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin. Before 2022, she was an associate professor at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences (Shaninka) and a senior lecturer at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA) and head of its Center for Legislative Studies. From December 2018 to October 2019, Schulmann was a member of the Russian Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights.

She previously worked as a civil servant in local administration, as well as a parliamentary deputy’s aide, political faction analyst, and expert in the analytical department of the Russian State Duma.

Schulmann is the author of the books Legislation as a Political Process and Practical Political Science: A Guide to Contact with Reality. She is also one of the co-authors of The New Autocracy: Information, Politics, and Policy in Putin’s Russia. Schulmann’s YouTube channel, which has over one million subscribers, is one of the most closely-followed online sources of insight and analysis for Russian-speaking audiences on the Internet.

Since 2017, she has hosted Status, a popular weekly online program. Following the closure of Moscow-based independent radio station Ekho Moskvy in early 2022, the program has continued, thanks to a collaboration involving the Russian platform of Bild, the German media organization, and Zhivoy Gvozd’, the successor to Ekho Moskvy.