From 2004 to February 2022, she was the host of the author's program "Full Albats" on Echo of Moscow radio station.

[9] Albats started her professional work as a freelance reporter with Komsomolskaya Pravda, while she was still a senior at the Moscow State University's Department of Journalism.

From 1986 to 1992, she worked for The Moscow News as a special assignment correspondent, writing about the USSR's notorious political police, the KGB.

[10] She received the Golden Pen Award from the Russian Union of Journalists for exposing poor conditions in maternity wards in 1989.

[11] Albats was fired from Izvestia in 1997 after she had completed a major article exposing alleged illegal activities by the FSB.

[18] In 1992 Albats was appointed a consultant for a Russian Duma commission to examine KGB involvement in Soviet coup attempt of 1991.

She wrote that KGB directors Lavrenty Beria, Yuri Andropov and Vladimir Kryuchkov manipulated Communist Party leaders.

[22] She cited KGB notes describing transfers of money to communist parties of United States, Finland, France, Italy, as well as "commercial dealings" of Rajiv Gandhi's family with Soviet foreign trade.

[23][24] Albats learned that the KGB employed the future Russian Patriarch Alexius II as an agent under a nickname Drozdov.

In February 2007, she held a talk with Olga Kryshtanovskaya, director of the Moscow-based Centre for the Study of Elites.

Albats was married to journalist, writer and science popularizer Yaroslav Golovanov and has a daughter, Olga (b.