New research is out!

Out of the black box:
new ways to collect
data about Russia

Publications 3

Research · Mar 2024

How to uncover electoral fraud in Russia using statistics: a complete guide

Vladimir Putin won the presidential election for the fifth time, receiving a record 87% of the votes in the history of modern Russia, with an equally record turnout of 77%. With it comes a record level of falsifications. Cedar’s team has studied the detailed results of 12 federal elections during Putin's reign and documented various types of violations using electoral statistics methods. This is how Russian elections transformed from being relatively fair to a complete imitation of the voting process.

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Research · Mar 2024

Can Russian data be trusted? A hazard map of official statistics

After the outbreak of the full-scale war in Ukraine, many academics, experts, and journalists found themselves cut off from their usual sources of information about what is happening in Russia. The country's authorities have classified dozens important statistical indicators, and those that remain publicly accessible are increasingly suspected of being unreliable. Russian official data had previously raised questions, but now statistics has become a key part of "information warfare". We have selected 30 important indicators from different areas and assessed them for manipulation.

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Research · Mar 2024

Social media monitoring on the eve of the presidential elections in Russia

More than 100 thousand Russian public organizations are involved in election advertising. These mainly include schools, kindergartens, and local administrations. Public sector employees are directly campaigning to vote for Putin. At the same time, the presidential elections are not the most important topic on the agenda of state media. Here is a data-driven review of the Russian pre-elections campaign on social media.

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Our data

This section in beta stage right now, but you can still request the data.
We will contact you and provide the access.

Elections

Election data covering all federal elections and a referendum in Russia.

  • Years: 2000-2021
  • Election results (number of voters, number of voting participants, results for each candidate)
  • Data from more than 90,000 election commissions
Explore

Court Decisions

Database of criminal and administrative cases in Russia

  • Years: 2000-2024
  • Cases: 5+ million
  • Court decisions, crime and sentencing descriptions and more
  • Data from 2000+ court websites

Propaganda

Archive of articles from Russian pro-government media RIA Novosti.

  • Years: 2001-2023
  • Articles: 3.5 million
  • Transcribed versions of TV broadcasts and other

At Cedar, we carefully curate our data and publish only what has value for further research. As the project develops, this section will expand, and it will become possible to explore and download raw data.

Our partners

About

After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia has become a closed country. Researchers have lost access to their sources. But digital methods can break through the new "iron curtain." Cedar is an independent think-tank aimed at providing data about Russia to the academic and expert community.

Our team consists of independent researchers, computer scientists, and data journalists who have been studying Russia for many years and are now working in exile. Over time, we have accumulated expertise and data, which have become more in demand since the new stage of Russian aggression in Ukraine began in 2022. Now, we want to help the academic and expert community better understand Russia using digital tools and resources that we provide. One of the project's founders is Arnold Khachaturov, sociologist and head of the data department at Novaya Gazeta Europe. Our senior researcher is Alesya Sokolova, the head of propaganda studies and an expert in social media data.
All our data are open but require a lot of resources to collect and process. We work mostly with alternative methods of data collection, such as web scraping and OSINT, but also with critically examined official statistics. We closely follow ethical guidelines for data collection and prepare detailed codebooks to make the data collection process transparent in each specific case. We often process the collected data for our own research but always keep an archive of the raw material for potential reuse.
At the moment, Cedar does not have a permanent source of funding. We launched the site with our own funds and partnership projects, which can be explored above. Now we are open to various partnership proposals.
Our team welcomes researchers, developers, data and ML engineers, and other specialists interested in developing an archive of Russian data. We also collect information about the needs of scholars quantitatively studying Russia, in order to make our work more useful. If you want to share your thoughts or participate in any of our projects, drop us a line using the form below.
Yes, a lot. But there is no public infrastructure to access it yet. Most of the data is stored in our repositories and is not available for download, but you can request it by contacting us. In some cases, we are ready to collect specific data upon request.

Contact us

If you want to request data, join the team or simple share your thoughts on the work we do — don't hesitate to leave us a message.

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