Another in our series of translations of the latest Carnegie Politika articles.
Secrecy Vs. Control: What’s Going On with the Classification of Russian Statistics
Openness is no longer declared by the Russian authorities as an instrument of transparency and accountability. But it still partially persists, primarily as a by-product of the desire to control the population and bureaucracy.
Arnold Khachaturov
After the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russian authorities rushed to classify statistical indicators reflecting the state of affairs in the country one after another. The latest recent example is demographic statistics, where in May Rosstat stopped publishing updated information even on the birth rate. Before that, the same fate befell the life expectancy metric at the regional level. And the detailed breakdown of the causes of death of Russians disappeared from public access three years ago. Against the backdrop of a full-scale war, the classification of statistics has acquired an institutional character in Russia. However, it is still too early to talk about a complete loss of transparency. The reason for this is the inertia of openness.
Turning Away from Openness
The Russian state apparatus stopped striving for transparency long before the war began. For several years now, new categories of data have been disappearing from public access, and the concept of state secrets is constantly expanding. The year 2018 could be considered the turning point, when Vladimir Putin began his fourth term, and the Open Government initiative was finally curtailed (Mikhail Abyzov, who supervised this project as a minister, is still serving a prison sentence for fraud). But the full-scale invasion of Ukraine took this process to a new level.
Until 2022, the restrictions mainly concerned sources used for anti-corruption investigations. For example, in 2016, after the release of a corresponding investigation by the Anti-Corruption Foundation [FBK], the Russian State Register began hiding the names of the sons of former Prosecutor General Yuri Chayka, replacing them with random sets of characters. And government agencies were increasingly allowed not to publish contracts on the government procurement portal.
Nowadays, the publication of high-profile investigations also periodically leads to the deletion of data. Since February 2022, there have been at least 12 known cases where data was purged shortly after being used by journalists. For example, this happened with the Federal Penitentiary Service’s information on the size of the prison population, which Mediazona used to estimate the scale of recruitment in Russian prisons.
However, such counter-censorship is only the tip of the iceberg. Data are increasingly being removed not after the publication of materials that are dangerous to the authorities, but preemptively and without apparent pretext – simply because it is politically acceptable. This is also facilitated by the fact that the ability to hide information is no longer tied only to state secrets: in 2023, the State Duma approved amendments to the law “On Official Statistical Accounting,” allowing the government to suspend the publication of statistics at its own discretion.
The new security procedures are not only aimed at protecting someone’s villas and private jets from investigators. They are about preventing leaks of any data that could create a negative perception of the situation in Russia. In the context of the “information war,” publicity is increasingly viewed by the authorities as a risk factor.
How to Measure Security
It is difficult to accurately assess the scale of restricting access to statistical data in Russia for several reasons. First, the sources of data are very unequal. You can hide a hundred technical documents, and no one will notice. Or you can classify one table that all analysts regularly use. The effect of the second action is disproportionately greater. In the case of open data, quantity does not always mean quality.
Second, the system of publishing statistics in Russia is extremely fragmented: there are collections and bulletins of Rosstat, the Unified Interdepartmental Information and Statistical System (EMISS), regional portals, and departmental websites. They are all organized differently. It is not easy to reduce everything to a single denominator in order to understand the true scale of the censorship.
Nevertheless, it is possible to get a rough idea — for example, by comparing the sections with open data on the websites of federal government bodies before and after February 2022. Such a calculation shows that more than a thousand data sets have disappeared from open access since 2022. This does not include the Open Data Portal, whose work was “suspended” in the spring of 2023. Along with it, the count goes to tens of thousands of indicators.
The lost data files included a lot of not very popular information: lists of vacancies, inspection schedules, makeup of scientific councils, and so on. And the removal of long-outdated information in itself should not always be interpreted as an act of censorship. But the overall picture is clear: over the past three years, the removal of data from open access has become systemic in Russia, covering dozens of federal and regional departments.
What Are They Removing, and Why
Three large clusters of remote data can be categorized: administrative-bureaucratic, financial-economic, and social.
The first category is the most widespread, but its value is limited. Sometimes this information is closed for formal reasons in order to report on the fulfillment of requirements from above. For example, after the drone attack on Moscow in 2023, Russian agencies began to massively delete the addresses of infrastructure facilities. It was assumed that this would make it more difficult to guide Ukrainian UAVs to targets.
Economic data is the area most affected by censorship, and was the first to be closed after the invasion began. For example, the Central Bank stopped publishing data on gold and foreign exchange reserves and allowed credit institutions to independently determine the volume of disclosed reports. The Federal Customs Service stopped publishing information on imports and exports. The Ministry of Finance limited the publication of data on operational budget execution. Information on oil and gas production and processing was also shut down.
The formal justification for most of these restrictions is to protect Russia from sanctions pressure from “unfriendly states.” However, the specific wording depends on the agencies, which display varying degrees of creativity. For example, when censoring data on gasoline production, the Ministry of Energy cited the “geopolitical situation,” the risks of “market manipulation,” and considerations of “energy security.”
The temptation to use these abstract formulations to remove information, the availability of which in the public domain has long irritated the Russian elite, turned out to be high. In the fog of “geopolitical tensions,” sources that allowed one to judge the prosperity of deputies and officials disappeared. The publication of their income declarations is no longer mandatory, and Rosreestr can no longer be used in journalistic investigations on the same scale as before.
The third category of deleted data is information about the state of Russian society. The argument about sanctions for this group works to a lesser extent. Many indicators were deleted without any obvious reason, just in case.
Thus, the legal portal of the Prosecutor General’s Office, where operational statistics on crime were published, stopped working. Most likely, the Russian government was afraid of “negativity” in the media, especially since interpreting these data has become really difficult. For example, a record level of murders was recorded in Moscow, but a more thorough analysis showed that the statistics included crimes committed in the “new territories,” where many cases were sent to investigators from Moscow.
Similarly, Rosprirodnadzor has stopped publishing data on the composition of pollutant emissions from Russian companies. The likely goal is to avoid media and activist attention to this topic against the backdrop of weakening environmental regulations.
This also includes data that were used to indirectly assess the scale of mobilization and losses in the war: the number of recipients of pensions from security agencies, statistics on disability, budget expenditures on compensation for the dead, etc. The logic here is obvious: the dissemination of any unofficial information about losses in Russia is prohibited and is classified as a criminal offense.
Sovereign Statistics
The rate of shutting down statistics in Russia remains high: hundreds of data sets disappear every year, and 2024 has broken all records. At the same time, the share of socially significant information in these files is gradually decreasing. Almost everything important that the authorities wanted to classify disappeared in the first two years of the war, and then everything else went under the knife. Nevertheless, even in 2025, individual cases affect critically important segments. Demographic statistics are a striking example.
At the same time, the process of classifying data still looks rather random and inconsistent. There is no clear gradation of data sensitivity and no full-fledged state policy on this topic. Departments themselves decide how to adapt to the new realities of “geopolitical tensions.”
Some demonstrate formal loyalty to the new model by deleting things that no one used anyway. A good example is the Open Data Portal, which was closed in 2023: 98% of the datasets posted there were downloaded less than a hundred times, and almost a third – never at all. Other structures delete data from one site, but leave it in another. Or even launch new interfaces for accessing statistics, like the Central Bank.
Not so long ago, the Russian system of public administration was considered one of the most open in the world. Billions of rubles were invested in an “infrastructure of openness” — for the sake of developing markets, attracting Western investment, and demonstrating Russia’s advancement. As a result, even after the large-scale purge of recent years, we still have access to very large amounts of information. Most agencies still publish specialized statistical observation forms, and EMISS contains at least five thousand current data sets. In some cases, up-to-date monthly data is hidden, but annual summaries continue to be published.
Today, the idea of maximum openness in Russia is considered hostile — instead, a course towards “sovereign statistics” has been proclaimed. However, there remains an important incentive for preserving the infrastructure of open data — the digitalization of the state and public administration. An extensive network of information systems — from “Gosuslugi” [the Government Services portal] and the register of electronic summonses to portals of court data and tax statistics — acts as a barrier to total censorship. These services are used by the state, businesses, and ordinary citizens. A complete rejection of the principles of openness would require a large-scale restructuring of the system, and with it the associated high costs. Nevertheless, attempts are being made to transfer some information to a restricted access zone — for example, exclusively through “Gosuslugi”.
Meanwhile, at a lower level, officials are guided by the logic of “protecting the field.” The development and support of information systems is a good piece of the budget pie, which one does not want to give up. Moreover, the ability to recalculate and measure something for any bureaucrat is a demonstration of control over reality, which is highly valued in the still technocratic Russian government. So sometimes the publication of information can also occur within the framework of departments gaining the competitive edge over others.
Openness in Russia is no longer declared as an instrument of transparency and accountability. It remains primarily a by-product of the desire to control the population and bureaucracy. But due to the fact that the system was built as an open one for many years, it is impossible to turn the switch and instantly turn into North Korea.
The trend towards restricting access to information will most likely continue. But the process itself will stretch into years, if not decades. Moreover, sometimes we will even see individual steps in the opposite direction – for example, the publication of new datasets.
Thus, according to the federal plan of statistical work, in 2025 a lot of data on the incidence of HIV, tuberculosis and hepatitis will be published with details by region – previously they were available only in aggregate form for the country. In June, the Ministry of Labor published a ranking of graduate employability based on data on average salaries in thousands of organizations. That is, the trend towards secrecy is not as linear as it may seem. The Russian authorities can afford such nonlinearity because the country’s sea of information has been cleaned up to such an extent that the presence of islands of open data therein does not threaten political stability. Moreover, at the current stage, the costs of further increasing the level of secrecy exceed the potential benefits for the regime from more severe interference in statistics.
Translating History 