Paul Goble
Staunton, July 14 – The Kremlin’s decision to stop publishing key demographic data and information about its foreign policy tactics have attracted a great deal of attention (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2025/07/kremlin-classifies-information-not-only.html); but since 2022, the Russian government has restricted many other kinds of information as well.
Rina Nikolayeva of the Important Stories portal provides a comprehensive listing of these restrictions, something that makes it clear just how far the Putin regime has moved in this direction over the last three years (istories.media/stories/2025/07/14/chto-v-chernom-yashchike-glavnie-dannie-o-rossii-kotorie-vlasti-skrili-s-2022-goda/).
In addition to demographic and diplomatic data, she writes, Moscow has stopped or seriously cutback the release of previously available data on migration and crime, government budgets, and the ownership of property. In each case, Nikolayeva describes the ways that researchers have adopted in their efforts to work around these restrictions.
But she concludes her report with a quotation Russian political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann, now in emigration, to highlight just how serious this closing off of information is. “The restriction of data is an attack on the social sciences, on civil society, and on the possibility of studying what is happening in the country and controlling decisions the powers make.”
“All autocracies, of which Russia is one, act in the same way,” she continues. “They monopolize power, attempt to control the public sphere and distort data,” all so as to put out the version of reality they want people to believe in and ensure that they will remain in power and with ever fewer restrictions on their activities.
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