How to Study a Closing Country: Navigating Official Secrecy, Data Distortion, and Propaganda in Contemporary Russia

In authoritarian and semi-authoritarian systems, prone to external conflicts and internal repressiveness, traditional sources of reliable information - statistical data, legal documents, official statements - become inaccessible or intentionally distorted. distorted, inaccessible, or deliberately manipulated. Researchers and analysts face the growing challenge of working at a distance from the subject of their expertise: many scholars can no longer visit their countries of interest without the risk of arrest, nor can they rely on direct observation or fieldwork.

 

This session explored the methodological difficulties of studying a state in the process of political and informational closure and the ways of surmounting these obstacles in the name of objective scholarship and the search for truth. How do we assess narratives shaped by propaganda? How do we work with fragmentary or falsified data? What replaces in-person research when the country in question becomes physically inaccessible? And what does expertise mean when the object of study is actively resisting scrutiny?

 

 

Ekaterina Schulmann is a political scientist specializing in the functioning of political institutions and legislative processes, with particular attention to the decision-making and bureaucratic behavior of modern authoritarian regimes, with a focus on Russia and the post-Soviet space. Ekaterina Schulmann teaches political science at the Osteuropa Institut Freie Universität Berlin and is an expert for the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin.

 

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.

Since 2017, she has hosted Status, a popular weekly program dedicated to analysing the news of the week and popularising political science terminology, concepts and thinkers. Following the closure of Moscow-based independent radio station Ekho Moskvy in early 2022, the program has continued online. Schulmann’s YouTube channel, which has over 1.22 million subscribers, serves as a source of insight and analysis for Russian-speaking audiences on the Internet.