[6] In 2012–2014, Zygar was among the group of 'leading Russian journalists' who had annual interviews with President of Russia (then Prime Minister) Dmitry Medvedev.

[8] Its troubles began when the channel was aggressively covering the daily anti-government protests in Ukraine, which state-owned television dismissed as a neo-Nazi coup.

The channel cut its expenses in half, shed about 30 percent of its staff and reduced its monthly budget before being hit with an eviction notice.

Simultaneously, TV Rain raised about $1 million in a crowd-funding campaign in March, proving that the demand for independent media in Russia is still there.

Chief editor of Echo of Moscow radio Alexei Venediktov claimed that some high-ranking statesmen, including Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, were infuriated by the book and they demanded TV Rain's owner Natalya Sindeyeva to get rid of Zygar.

[14] On February 24, 2022, the day Russia's invasion of Ukraine began, Zygar launched an online petition on Facebook condemning the war.

[17] Since April 2022, Zygar has been making a series of interviews on YouTube with "the brightest minds of humanity",[18] including Francis Fukuyama, Robert Sapolsky, Yuval Noah Harari, Steven Pinker, Anne Applebaum, Ralph Fiennes, John Malkovich, Timothy Snyder, Karl Schlögel, Massimo Pigliucci, William Taubman, Fareed Zakaria, Aleksander Kwaśniewski and Mikhail Gorbachev.

[20] He was the seventh Russian to be honored (after Tatyana Mitkova in 1991, Yevgeny Kiselyov in 1995, Yelena Masyuk in 1997, Musa Muradov in 2003, Dmitry Muratov in 2007 and Nadira Isayeva in 2010).

He is more interested in tracing Russian leadership's slide into the aggressive worldview that has eventually led to the war in Eastern Ukraine and military intervention in Syria.

The way the story is told allows readers to recognize today's realities in almost every character or event: the century-old country looks like a reflection of modern Russia.

Emily Tamkin of Foreign Policy described the book as "an immensely compelling work that transports the reader to the streets of St. Petersburg to see the early 20th century unfold for herself".

[32] The Empire Must Die is listed among the Best Non-Fiction works of 2017 by Kirkus Reviews, characterised as a "a vivid, character-driven reconstruction of the period leading up to the overthrow of the Romanovs".

[39] In 2018, Zygar's Future History studio launched its next digital venture: 1968.digital, a web documentary series with vertical episodes that "show the life of real historical personalities through the screens of their would-be smartphones".

[40] The series covers the events of 1968 all over the world and is distributed in English on BuzzFeed News,[41] in Russian and in French on the website of the Libération newspaper.

[44] In November 2018, Future History pre-launched a series of an app of Moscow walking tours – the Mobile Art Theatre.

The tours resemble a play taking place in the imagination of the audience, telling the stories of historical figures who lived and worked in these city streets.

The first tour is narrated by Kirill Serebrennikov who "tells the history of his neighbourhood in Moscow, which was home to cultural icons such as Mikhail Bulgakov, Boris Pasternak, poet Sergei Yesenin, or philosopher and writer Alexander Herzen".