ALT The Russo-Ukrainian war and the deterioration of the relationship between Russia and the West made the application of traditional social science research methods, such as surveys and fieldwork, difficult for researchers. It is likely that in the foreseeable future students of Russia will have to increasingly rely on the data that can be collected online. Using these data has defined the field of computational social science and has many analytical advantages and some limitations. This article provides a review of the sources of digital trace data for Russia and of the studies that used them for the analysis of political communication and behavior, education, labor markets, discrimination, and the Russo-Ukrainian war.

ALT While authoritarian regimes are typically seen as prone to secrecy and restricting access to data, individual autocracies differ greatly from each other—some are better in terms of data accessibility and quality than others. The preference of autocracies for secrecy is likely to depend on a large number of scope conditions. One particularly likely condition is the perception of external and domestic threats, which ought to make the preference for secrecy stronger. From this perspective, we look at how Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine affected the data availability preferences of the Russian authoritarian regime. Whereas before the invasion, Russia belonged to autocracies with relatively high data availability, the war led to decreasing data availability and quality. At the same time, even after the full-scale invasion, Russia continues to publish a large number of datasets and allows data collection by independent pollsters.

ALT The Russian online sphere today is subjected to sophisticated forms of control, including self-censorship, legal repression, and the shutdown of global platforms such as X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, leaving state-controlled Russian platforms as the primary means of digital communication for the public. In this article, we explore the potential and limitations of using social media data to study cultural processes and societal dynamics within a non-transparent authoritarian context of wartime Russia as the government attempts to censor all explicit forms of political communication. Specifically, we discuss data provided by social media listening (SML) platforms and argue that, despite methodological and organizational challenges, SML in an authoritarian context offers unique opportunities to gauge cultural and social trends, particularly through the identification of micro triggers (signals) and macro patterns of online discourse.

ALT This article explores how text-as-data methodologies can be used to reveal patterns of mass-media manipulation strategies employed in modern autocracies. First, it explains the importance of studying media strategies by reviewing literature on autocratic resilience, with a particular focus on scholarship addressing state-controlled mass-media tactics. Next, it outlines the computational methods currently used to study mass-media management, highlighting key academic contributions in the field of political communication, especially those focused on present-day autocracies. Finally, the article discusses the challenges of using text-as-data methods to study mass-media management strategies in autocracies.

ALT The “exogenous shock” provoked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 has profoundly transformed the subfield of Russian studies, raising significant methodological and epistemological issues. Like many before them, scholars in Russian studies, mainly from Western institutions, are faced with the need to renew their research methods and sources in light of the challenging access to the research field in Russia. Rooted in discussions on the “computational turn” and digitization of area studies, this article proposes to overcome these new challenges by exploring Russia through its digital fieldwork. Over the past decade, open-source investigations have become decisive in the documentation of objects as diverse as organized crime, elite corruption, or contemporary conflicts.

ALT This article explores how Russian sociologists contributed to the moral framing of economic reform during the post-Soviet 1990s. Drawing on opinion polls conducted by the famous Russian poll center VTsIOM between 1993 and 2000, it argues that these surveys operated not only as descriptive instruments but also as prescriptive texts promoting a normative model of the ideal capitalist worker. Sociologists advanced a trinity of traits—motivation, self-reliance, and risk affinity—as essential to overcoming a perceived “Soviet deformation” of the workforce. While these ideas reflected global neoliberal currents, they were also deeply rooted in late Soviet concerns with labor productivity. By tracing the genealogy of these discourses from the 1960s through the perestroika era, the article challenges the notion of a sharp post-1991 rupture and highlights the continuity of reformist thinking that added to the urgency of the reform agenda after 1991.

ALT Today scholars have often expressed skepticism about the existence of any significant anti-war resistance within Russia, as well as about the feasibility and necessity of studying Russian society. By analyzing the data collected in 21 interviews with Russian liberal scholars, conducted in 2022–23, I show that resistance could be reconceptualized along the lines of James Scott’s infrapolitics: interview as a method that still enables one to reconstruct the way in which Russian oppositional scholars see their changed social role, relations with the outside world, and the possibilities of resistance.

ALT This study explores the discursive patterns of mutual altercasting, role-claiming, and symbolic contestation in Russian and Chinese media in the 2010s, relying on the national role theory (NRT). The article demonstrates how the relations between Russia and China may be considered from the perspective of the complexity of role claims, mutual expectations, and altercasting efforts rather than locating them along the spectrum with good and bad at the edges. This study thus reveals how Russian expectations to enact the role of competitors vis-à-vis the West jointly are not fully reflected by Chinese media. Yet, Chinese media conforms to the Russian expectation of acceptance as a great power. China’s expectation of Russia to jointly act as a model for other nations in global governance is eventually built into Russian media discourses.

ALT Bazaars, street trading, and secondhand car marts accompanied the implosion of the communist economies throughout Central and Eastern Europe during the early 1990s. In Poland, due to the longtime agony of the country’s economy under late socialism, informal markets spread earlier than elsewhere in the region. While acknowledging the crucial role of this homegrown market economy in shaping vernacular imaginaries of capitalism in the transformation period, this article argues for caution with romanticizing it in retrospect. Contemporaneously, the extraordinary expansion of informal markets continued to be contested on various grounds. The emergent spirit of capitalism did not blend easily with the social fabric of the time, and it was left to municipal governments to regulate what was seen as chaotic and unwelcome proliferation by many—not least because it introduced a tangible transnational dimension into post-socialist lifeworlds.

ALT This article addresses the origins of income inequality in post-socialist countries from Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia, from 1991 to 2016. The aim is to analyze the relationship between democracy and income inequality. In previous studies, this topic has led to ambiguous findings, especially in the context of the group of countries we are focusing on. We examine whether the process of democratization co-occurred with changes in income distribution over the entire period under study, and its impact on individual income deciles to determine who benefited most from the new system. The obtained results allowed us to confirm that the actual relationship between democratization and income inequality did not exist, or at most was illusory in the 1990s, but it was present, relevant, and had a pro-equality character between 2001 and 2016.

ALT While contemporary scholarship on post-Soviet informality typically frames informal networks as either adaptive (survival) or parallel (subversive forces undermining formal governance) mechanisms, this ethnographic study demonstrates their dual nature as both. Focusing on Uzbekistan’s transitional context (2020–24), the article reveals how informal business networks construct hybrid governance by actively reshaping formal institutions through the influence of their cultural dispositions (collectively internalized informal ideological frameworks and normative practices). Employing a socio-legal perspective, the research examines the complex interplay between formal and informal institutions to better understand the dual functionality of informal business networks in the post-Soviet context.

ALT This article investigates the role of two state youth group leaders in disseminating patriotic discourses to young Russians on Telegram in the first six months after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The authors argue that these leaders use social media influencer (SMI) techniques to “launder” and propagate narratives that align with the Kremlin’s agenda. The methodological approach involved a comprehensive critical discourse analysis of six months of posts from the Telegram accounts of Nikita Nagornyy, leader of Iunarmiia [Youth Army], and Olga Zanko, leader of Volontery Pobedy [Victory Volunteers]. By cataloguing and comparing the thematic and rhetorical elements of these posts, the study identifies key strategies used to disseminate discourses around patriotic behavior and active engagement with state politics. “Good patriots” were deemed to be those who aided other Russians, took part in the perpetuation of memory politics, and engaged in militarized activities.

ALT This article examines the enactment and implications of China’s 2024 Patriotic Education Law (PEL), situating it within the broader political, ideological, and legal transformations under Xi Jinping. It traces the evolution of patriotic education from the post-Mao reform era to the present, highlighting key shifts in content, scope, and institutionalization. Under Xi, patriotism has become increasingly conflated with loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Han-centric cultural nationalism, and ideological conformity, culminating in the legal codification of patriotic education as a comprehensive and compulsory societal obligation. The article argues that the PEL exemplifies the CCP’s strategy of legitimizing authoritarian governance through law while tightening ideological control over youth, religious institutions, families, and the Chinese diaspora. It analyzes the legal provisions of the PEL, its discursive underpinnings, and its broader ideological context.

ALT The full-scale war in Ukraine has had a wide-ranging impact on the nation’s children as they have been displaced, wounded, and even killed. In the context of the Russia-Ukraine war, Ukrainian children found ways and created spaces that allowed them to express their agency, ranging from narrating their experiences in diaries, poems, and art to engaging in political activities related to war. This study explores the potential of arts-based programs to empower children affected by armed conflict, with a focus on the Behind Blue Eyes initiative, implemented following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. By distributing disposable cameras, this program encouraged children affected by war to document their lives through photography, subsequently sharing their visual narratives on the Behind Blue Eyes initiative’s social media account on Instagram.

ALT While authoritarian regimes are typically seen as prone to secrecy and restricting access to data, individual autocracies differ greatly from each other—some are better in terms of data accessibility and quality than others. The preference of autocracies for secrecy is likely to depend on a large number of scope conditions. One particularly likely condition is the perception of external and domestic threats, which ought to make the preference for secrecy stronger. From this perspective, we look at how Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine affected the data availability preferences of the Russian authoritarian regime. Whereas before the invasion, Russia belonged to autocracies with relatively high data availability, the war led to decreasing data availability and quality. At the same time, even after the full-scale invasion, Russia continues to publish a large number of datasets and allows data collection by independent pollsters.

ALT This study examines how media literacy influences the perceptions of young people in Uzbekistan regarding the Russia-Ukraine war. With the media’s pervasive role in shaping public understanding of global events, this research explores the extent to which media literacy, defined as the ability to critically analyze and evaluate media messages, affects the views of Uzbekistani youth on this conflict. Using a mixed-methods approach, the study combines qualitative interviews and a quantitative survey involving 927 participants under 35 years old. The findings showed that higher levels of media literacy among Uzbekistani youth correlate with more critical perspectives on the war, a greater capacity to identify bias, and a reduced susceptibility to propagandistic narratives. Conversely, lower levels of media literacy indicated a correlation with strong support for one-sided, particularly, Russian-aligned narratives without questioning or minimal critical judgment.

ALT The collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent “wild 1990s” are increasingly portrayed in Russian public discourse as a traumatic experience. This framing contrasts the perceived chaos and lawlessness of the 1990s with a nostalgic idealization of the Soviet past and the narrative of restored state strength since Putin’s second presidency. This pervasive framing often implicitly imposes a role of disempowered subjects upon individuals who lived through the upheaval. Drawing on biographical interviews conducted in 2018 with 12 former market traders across Russia, this article challenges these instrumental trauma narratives. The analysis explores how people who worked as “shuttle traders” in the 1990s retroactively construct their pasts by asserting their active participation and rejecting externally defined victimhood.

ALT This article explores the phenomenon of language activism in Kazakhstan, examining its roots and contemporary manifestations within a decolonial framework. Despite Soviet colonialism not being traditionally classified as typical colonialism, it resulted in significant sociolinguistic inequalities, particularly between the Russian and Kazakh languages. The research highlights how modern Kazakh language activists challenge this imbalance by promoting the use and prestige of Kazakh, addressing issues of linguistic justice and national identity reconstruction. The study emphasizes the impact of nation-building policies and the role of grassroots activism in navigating the complexities of bilingualism and ethnic identity. It argues that the current wave of activism not only reflects decolonial sentiments but also contributes to a broader discourse on linguistic justice in a multiethnic society.