Adaptation of Russian Society to the New Realities:
What We Can Observe from the Available Statistics and What Is Hidden
Project Description
The main goal of the project is to understand how the full-scale war with Ukraine affects Russian society and regional development. The main tasks of the lab is to give the answers on the question. If the war really led to social consolidation in Russia, the formation of a new state economic model (Russian military Keynesianism) and confidence in the future? And how much does confidence in the future influence people’s behaviour? What is the impact of the participation of Russian regions in the war (primarily casualties) on their socio-economic and demographic development? To what extent does the current rhetoric of the Russian state, formally aimed at increasing the population and fertility, lead to real demographic changes, and is the activity of regional administrators in banning abortion and restricting migration caused by objective indicators? Does the new rhetoric lead to the disruption between its supporters and opponents?
An additional objective of the project is related to the fact that the quality of Russian data on some demographic, economic, and social indicators has deteriorated since the start of a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Therefore, in order to achieve the main objective of the project, it was also necessary to identify and explain some of the distortions in the data. The research objective here was to find the reasons for the deliberate falsification and manipulation of data as well as data doctoring observed in Russian regions and to see how the methods of data manipulation have changed since the outbreak of the war.
As the sources of information, we used the data from publicly available sources, many of them integrated (and described and commented on) in independent initiatives, like Cedar or Russia: Known Unknowns.