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The Palgrave Handbook
of Digital Russia Studies
Edited by Daria Gritsenko
Mariëlle Wijermars · Mikhail Kopotev
The Palgrave Handbook of Digital Russia Studies
Daria Gritsenko
Mariëlle Wijermars • Mikhail Kopotev
Editors
The Palgrave
Handbook of Digital
Russia Studies
Editors
Daria Gritsenko Mariëlle Wijermars
University of Helsinki Maastricht University
Helsinki, Finland Maastricht, The Netherlands
Mikhail Kopotev
Higher School of Economics
(HSE University)
Saint Petersburg, Russia
ISBN 978-3-030-42854-9 ISBN 978-3-030-42855-6 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42855-6
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021. This book is an open access publication.
Open Access This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use,
sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give
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Cover design: eStudioCalamar
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Preface
This Handbook emerged out of the Digital Russia Studies (DRS) initiative,1
launched by Daria Gritsenko and Mariëlle Wijermars at the University of
Helsinki’s Aleksanteri Institute and Helsinki Center for Digital Humanities
(HELDIG) in January 2018. The aim of the DRS initiative was to unite schol-
ars of the humanities and the social and computer sciences working at the
intersection of “digital” and “social” in the Russian context. By providing a
regular meeting place and networking opportunities, we sought to establish
open discussion and knowledge sharing among those who study the various
aspects of digitalization processes in Russia and those studying Russia with the
use of (innovative) digital methods. The many positive responses to our inter-
disciplinary approach and the exciting research that is currently conducted in
this area of study inspired us to join forces with Mikhail Kopotev to compile
this Handbook.
The editors would like to thank Lucy Batrouney and Mala Sanghera-Warren,
our commissioning editors at Palgrave Macmillan, for their enthusiasm for the
project as well as the anonymous reviewers for their critical eye. We thank the
Faculty of Arts of the University of Helsinki for making it possible to publish
the Handbook in Open Access. We are particularly grateful to Aleksandr
Klimov, our research assistant, who was of great help in preparing the manu-
script for publication.
The interdisciplinarity of the Handbook has affected our choice concerning
the transliteration of Russian. While it is customary for scholars working in the
humanities and social sciences to apply the Library of Congress system of trans-
literation, for scholars in linguistics and computer science a different system,
ISO 9, is more appropriate. For consistency, we have chosen to follow the
v
vi PREFACE
Library of Congress system for references (authors’ names) and ISO 9 for all
other Russian terms and names throughout the book. Where appropriate, cus-
tomary English spellings are maintained for familiar terms, places, and per-
sonal names.
Helsinki, Finland Daria Gritsenko

Maastricht, The Netherlands Mariëlle Wijermars
Saint Petersburg, Russia Mikhail Kopotev
Note
1. https://blogs.helsinki.fi/digital-russia-studies/.
Contents
1 Digital Russia Studies: An Introduction 1

Daria Gritsenko, Mikhail Kopotev, and Mariëlle Wijermars
Part I Studying Digital Russia 13
2 The Digitalization of Russian Politics and

Political Participation 15
Mariëlle Wijermars
3 E-Government in Russia: Plans, Reality, and Future Outlook 33

Daria Gritsenko and Mikhail Zherebtsov
4 Russia’s Digital Economy Program: An Effective

Strategy for Digital Transformation? 53
Anna Lowry
5 Law and Digitization in Russia 77

Marianna Muravyeva and Alexander Gurkov
6 Personal Data Protection in Russia 95

Alexander Gurkov
7 Cybercrime and Punishment: Security, Information War,

and the Future of Runet115
Elizaveta Gaufman
vii
viii Contents
8 Digital Activism in Russia: The Evolution and Forms of

Online Participation in an Authoritarian State135
Markku Lonkila, Larisa Shpakovskaya, and Philip Torchinsky
9 Digital Journalism: Toward a Theory of Journalistic Practice

in the Twenty-First Century155
Vlad Strukov
10 Digitalization of Russian Education: Changing Actors and

Spaces of Governance171
Nelli Piattoeva and Galina Gurova
11 Digitalization of Religion in Russia: Adjusting Preaching to

New Formats, Channels and Platforms187
Victor Khroul
12 Doing Gender Online: Digital Spaces for Identity Politics205

Olga Andreevskikh and Marianna Muravyeva
13 Digitalization of Consumption in Russia: Online Platforms,

Regulations and Consumer Behavior221
Olga Gurova and Daria Morozova
14 Digital Art: A Sourcebook of Ideas for Conceptualizing New

Practices, Networks and Modes of Self-Expression241
Vlad Strukov
15 From Samizdat to New Sincerity. Digital Literature on the

Russian-Language Internet255
Henrike Schmidt
16 Run Runet Runaway: The Transformation of the Russian

Internet as a Cultural-Historical Object277
Gregory Asmolov and Polina Kolozaridi
Contents ix
Part II Digital Sources and Methods 297
17 Corpora in Text-Based Russian Studies299

Mikhail Kopotev, Arto Mustajoki, and
Anastasia Bonch-Osmolovskaya
18 RuThes Thesaurus for Natural Language Processing319

Natalia Loukachevitch and Boris Dobrov
19 Social Media-based Research of Interpersonal and Group

Communication in Russia335
Olessia Koltsova, Alexander Porshnev, and Yadviga Sinyavskaya
20 Digitizing Archives in Russia: Epistemic Sovereignty and Its

Challenges in the Digital Age353
Alexey Golubev
21 Affordances of Digital Archives: The Case of the Prozhito

Archive of Personal Diaries371
Ekaterina Kalinina
22 Open Government Data in Russia389

Olga Parkhimovich and Daria Gritsenko
23 Topic Modeling in Russia: Current Approaches and Issues in

Methodology409
Svetlana S. Bodrunova
24 Topic Modeling Russian History427

Mila Oiva
25 Studying Ideational Change in Russian Politics with Topic

Models and Word Embeddings443
Andrey Indukaev
x Contents
26 Deep Learning for the Russian Language465

Ekaterina Artemova
27 Shifting the Norm: The Case of Academic Plagiarism

Detection483
Mikhail Kopotev, Andrey Rostovtsev, and Mikhail Sokolov
28 Automatic Sentiment Analysis of Texts: The Case of Russian501

Natalia Loukachevitch
29 Social Network Analysis in Russian Literary Studies517

Frank Fischer and Daniil Skorinkin
30 Tweeting Russian Politics: Studying Online Political

Dynamics537
Mikhail Zherebtsov and Sergei Goussev
31 The State of the Art: Surveying Digital Russian Art History569

Reeta E. Kangas
32 Geospatial Data Analysis in Russia’s Geoweb585

Mykola Makhortykh
Index605
Notes on Contributors
Olga Andreevskikh is a PhD candidate at the University of Leeds, UK. Her

PhD thesis focuses on the verbal and visual communication of non-
heteronormative masculinities in contemporary Russian media. Her other
research projects focus on offline and online activism for women’s and LGBTQ
rights in contemporary Russia.
Ekaterina Artemova is a researcher at the National Researcher University
Higher School of Economics (HSE University), Saint Petersburg, Russia. Her
research interests include natural language processing in general as well as
applications of deep learning to information extraction and question answering.
Gregory Asmolov is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Russia Institute,
King’s College London. His research focuses on how ICTs constitute the role
of crowds in crisis situations. He has published in Journalism Studies, Policy &
Internet, Russian Politics, MIT’s Journal of Design and Science, and others on
vertical crowdsourcing, digital propaganda, and Internet regulation.
Svetlana S. Bodrunova is a professor at the School of Journalism and Mass
Communications, St. Petersburg State University, Russia, where she also leads
the Center for International Media Research. She has published two books,
several chapters, and over 80 research papers in Russian and English, including
in Journalism, International Journal of Communication, Media and
Communication, and Digital Journalism. Her research interests include
Russian and European journalism, media and politics, social media, and
ethnicity in communication.
Anastasia Bonch-Osmolovskaya is an associate professor at the School of
Linguistics, National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE
University), Saint Petersburg, Russia. She is also an academic supervisor of the
master’s program in computational linguistics and the founder of the Digital
Humanities Center at HSE. She is a member of the Russian Association for Digital
Humanities (DH-Russia). Her main research interests concern digital archives,
xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
linguistic and other textual corpora, and the implementation of quantitative meth-
ods in the studies of language, literature, and culture.
Boris Dobrov is the head of the Laboratory in Research Computing Center
of Lomonosov Moscow State University in Moscow, Russia. He leads the
development of software tools for processing and analyzing large text col-
lections, including RuThes-like large linguistic ontologies, ALOT
(Automated Linguistic Text Processing) tools, and NearIdx corporate
information-analytical system.
Frank Fischer is Associate Professor for Digital Humanities at the Higher
School of Economics (HSE University), Saint Petersburg, Russia, and director
of DARIAH-EU, the pan- European digital infrastructure for the arts and
humanities. He studied computer science, German literature, and Spanish phi-
lology in Leipzig and London and is an Ancien Pensionnaire de l’École
Normale Supérieure in Paris. He holds a PhD from the University of Jena for
a study of revenge in Enlightenment drama.
Elizaveta Gaufman is Assistant Professor of Russian Discourse and Politics at
the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. She is the author of Security
Threats and Public Perception: Digital Russia and the Ukraine Crisis (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2017). Her other publications include peer-reviewed articles on
nationalism, sexuality, and social networks, as well as regular blog posts at The
Duck of Minerva.
Alexey Golubev is Assistant Professor of Russian History and Digital
Humanities at the University of Houston. He holds a PhD degree in history
from the University of British Columbia (2016). Before starting his current
position, he was Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto.
Sergei Goussev is an independent scholar whose research focuses on compu-
tational propaganda, social media analytics, and political sociology of digital
social networks. He holds a master’s degree in financial economics from
Carleton University, Canada.
Daria Gritsenko is an assistant professor at the University of Helsinki,
Finland, affiliated with the Aleksanteri Institute and the Helsinki Center for
Digital Humanities (HELDIG). She is a co-founder of Digital Russia Studies,
an interdisciplinary network of scholars working at the intersection of “digital”
and “social” in Russia and beyond.
Alexander Gurkov is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki,
Faculty of Law. He researches international cooperative law, alternative dispute
resolution, and blockchain economy. Before working in academia, Gurkov
practiced law as an attorney in St. Petersburg.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii
Galina Gurova is a researcher at the SKOLKOVO Education Development

Centre with expertise in the field of school education. She currently pursues a
PhD degree at the Doctoral Programme of Education and Society at the
University of Tampere, Finland, and is a member of the EduKnow—
Knowledge, Power, and Politics in Education research group at the same
university.
Olga Gurova is Assistant Professor of Consumption Studies at Aalborg
University, Denmark. Her research interests include consumption studies,
social theory, and qualitative methods of social research. She is the author of
Fashion and the Consumer Revolution in Contemporary Russia (2015) and sev-
eral articles, published in the Journal of Consumer Culture, Consumption,
Markets and Culture, and Cultural Studies, among other journals.
Andrey Indukaev is a postdoctoral researcher at the Aleksanteri Institute of
the University of Helsinki. He is a member of the Digital Russia Studies
research group, working on the politics of digitalization in Russia and develop-
ing digital methods of textual analysis. His doctoral dissertation, defended in
2018 (ENS Paris-Saclay, France), focused on innovation policy and academic
entrepreneurship in Russia.
Ekaterina Kalinina is a senior lecturer at the Department of Media and
Communication Studies of Jönköping University, Sweden. She worked as a
research fellow at Swedish National Defense University, researching questions
of Russian patriotism and biopolitics. Her recent research project investigated
the role of affective mnemonic experiences in triggering social mobilization.
Kalinina also runs the Swedish NGO Nordkonst, where she manages cul-
tural projects.
Reeta E. Kangas is a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Art History at
the University of Turku. Her research focuses on Soviet and Russian visual art
and propaganda and the use of animal symbols for political purposes. In 2017,
she completed a PhD on animal symbolism in Soviet political cartoons.
Victor Khroul is an associate professor at the Department of Sociology of
Mass Communications, Faculty of Journalism, Lomonosov Moscow State
University. He is the author of Media and Religion in Russia (2012) and
over 90 publications in Russian and English. He is the founding editor of
the “Media and Religion” book series (published since 2011).
Polina Kolozaridi is a social researcher focusing on the Internet. Her key
research interests are around the issues of how we know, feel, anticipate, and imag-
ine technologies. In Moscow, Kolozaridi coordinates a grassroots community of
researchers (academic and independent) called the Club for Internet and Society
Enthusiasts (http://clubforinternet.net/). Together with other club members,
she organizes research projects and acts as a knowledge activist. She teaches
courses about Internet studies, amateur online media, and critical data studies at
the Higher School of Economics (HSE University), Saint Petersburg, Russia.
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Olessia Koltsova is an associate professor at the Department of Sociology of

the St. Petersburg School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Higher School of
Economics (HSE University), Saint Petersburg, Russia. She is the director of
the Laboratory for Internet Studies (LINIS) at HSE. Her research interests
include sociology of the Internet and of mass communication, political com-
munication, online interpersonal communication, online social networks, text
mining, big data analysis, and modeling.
Mikhail Kopotev is the academic director of the MA program in Language
Technology at Higher School of Economics (HSE University), Saint Petersburg,
Russia, and an associate professor at the University of Helsinki, Finland. His
research interests include corpus linguistics, quantitative analysis of big textual
data, plagiarism detection, and computer-assisted language learning. He is the
author of Introduction to Corpus Linguistics (Praha, 2014) and a co-editor of
Quantitative Approaches to the Russian Language (Routledge, 2018).
Markku Lonkila works as Professor of Sociology at the University of
Jyväskylä. His research concerns the study of social movements, social media,
social networks, and Russian society. Since the early 1990s, Lonkila has carried
out several empirical research projects in Russia, investigating the role of social
networks in civil society and economy and politics in Russia, often in a com-
parative perspective. Of late, he has focused on new forms of Russian civic and
political activism enabled by social media.
Natalia Loukachevitch is a leading researcher at the Research Computing
Center of Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia. She is the main author
of several large Russian resources for natural language processing including
RuThes thesaurus, Russian wordnet RuWordNet, the ontology on natural sci-
ence and technologies OENT, and Russian sentiment lexicon RuSentiLex. She
is the co-organizer of several Russian language evaluations such as senti-
ment analysis evaluations SentiRuEval and semantic similarity evalua-
tions RUSSE.
Anna Lowry is a postdoctoral researcher at the Aleksanteri Institute of the
University of Helsinki. She has published on a range of topics dealing with the
political economy of Russia and Eurasia. Recent publications have focused on
Russia’s development strategy and industrial policy.
Mykola Makhortykh is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bern.
He holds a PhD from the University of Amsterdam, where he studied digital
remembrance of WWII in Eastern Europe. Recently, he published on (coun-
ter)memory, discursive construction of (in)security, and conflict framing in
articles published in journals such as Media, War and Conflict, Memory Studies,
and Visual Communication.
Daria Morozova is a PhD student at Aalborg University, Denmark. She holds
a master’s degree in social sciences from the University of Helsinki. Her
research focuses on sociology of consumption, cultural entrepreneurship, and
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv
sustainability. Her current project concerns wearable technology, particularly

how it changes daily practices of consumers.
Marianna Muravyeva is Professor of Russian Law and Administration at the
University of Helsinki. Her research is interdisciplinary, bringing together
history, social sciences, and law to examine long-term trends and patterns in
social development with a special focus on normativity, gender, and violence.
Arto Mustajoki is professor emeritus at the University of Helsinki. He is a
leading research fellow at the National Research University Higher School of
Economics (HSE University), Saint Petersburg, Russia.
Mila Oiva is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Turku, Finland.
She is an expert on Russian and Polish history with a particular interest in the
transnational transfer of information and computational research meth-
ods. Her work has been published by Media History, among others.
Olga Parkhimovich is affiliated with the Faculty of Software Engineering and
Computer Systems at ITMO University (ITMO: Information Technologies,
Mechanics and Optics). She is a project manager at the NGO Information
Culture, the team leader of spending.gov.ru, and a member of the Public
Council at the Federal Treasury of the Russian Federation.
Nelli Piattoeva is University Lecturer in Education Sciences at the University
of Tampere, Finland, and Adjunct Professor of International and Comparative
Education Policy Research at the University of Oulu, Finland. Her
research interest in the institutions of formal education is mainly focused
on the complexities of the relationship between education policy-making
and the wider society.
Alexander Porshnev is a senior research fellow at the Laboratory of Internet
Studies of the National Research University Higher School of Economics
(HSE University), Saint Petersburg, Russia. His research interests include
mathematical models and data mining in psychology, marketing and manage-
ment (including social network analysis, cluster, factor, regression analysis, and
machine learning methods), and natural language processing.
Andrey Rostovtsev is a professor at the Institute for Information Transmission
Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Kharkevich Institute) in
Moscow, Russia. He is a co-founder of the Dissernet network project.
Henrike Schmidt is a private lecturer at the Szondi-Institute for Comparative
Literature, Freie Universität Berlin. Her research interests include digital cul-
ture in Eastern and Central Europe. Her publications include the monograph
Russian Literature on the Internet. Between Digital Folklore and Political
xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Propaganda (Transcript Verlag, 2011, in German). She is a co-editor of

the online journal Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New
Media (digitalicons.org).
Larisa Shpakovskaya holds a PhD in sociology and works on several research
projects at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Her research interests include
Internet communities on the Russian Internet, hate speech in the Russian-
language segment of the Internet, state regulation of Runet, and processes of
accumulating social capital in virtual communities and its conversion into a
resource for mobilizing collective actions.
Yadviga Sinyavskaya is a junior research fellow at the Laboratory for Internet
Studies (LINIS) and a PhD student at the Department of Sociology, St.
Petersburg School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Higher School of
Economics (HSE University), Saint Petersburg, Russia. Her research interests
include Internet studies, social psychology, online communication and online
behavior, online privacy, social network analysis, and online experiments.
Daniil Skorinkin is the head of the MA in digital humanities program at the
Higher School of Economics (HSE University), Saint Petersburg, Russia. He
teaches digital humanities and digital literacy courses and conducts research at
the HSE Centre for Digital Humanities. His research interests include stylom-
etry, network analysis of literary texts, and the use of computational methods
for literary research.
Mikhail Sokolov is Professor of Sociology at the European University at St.
Petersburg, Russia. His principal research interests are in the fields of microso-
ciological theory, social stratification, cultural consumption, sociology, and his-
tory of the social sciences.
Vlad Strukov is an associate professor at the University of Leeds, specializing
in Russian and Russophone media and communication with special focus on
visual culture and digital culture. He is the founding and principal editor of a
research journal called Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European
New Media (www.digitalicons.org).
Philip Torchinsky is an independent scholar who has specialized in computer
networks from 1993 onward. His current interests in social media include
technology marketing and messenger bots. He has co-authored a booklet on
hate speech on Runet while working as the head of the Computer Science
Center at the European University at St. Petersburg.
Mariëlle Wijermars is Assistant Professor of Cyber-Security and Politics at
Maastricht University, The Netherlands. She is a co-founder of the Digital
Russia Studies network and an editor of the journal Studies in Russian, Eurasian
Notes on Contributors xvii
and Central European New Media (digitalicons.org). She is the author of

Memory Politics in Contemporary Russia: Television, Cinema and the State
(2019) and editor (with Katja Lehtisaari) of Freedom of Expression in Russia’s
New Mediasphere (2020).
Mikhail Zherebtsov is an adjunct research professor at the Institute of
European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at Carleton University. His research
interests are focused on contemporary issues of governance and public policy
in Russia and other post-Soviet countries as well as computational political
studies, particularly social media analytics.
List of Figures
Fig. 17.1 Frequency of adjective decade constructions for each decade 307
Fig. 17.2 Distribution of rannie (early) and pozdnie (late) in decade
constructions308
Fig. 17.3 Frequencies of lihie devânostye (wild nineties) compared to all
adjectives attested in the construction (2001–2013, the
Newspaper subcorpus) 309
Fig. 17.4 The relative frequency (%) of modernizaciâ (modernization)
occurring in texts from Russian national newspapers (Source:
Integrum, Dec. 31, 2000—Dec. 31, 2012) 311
Fig. 17.5 The usage of modernizaciâ Rossii (modernization of Russia) in
comparison to importozamesê nie (import substitution) (Source:
Integrum, Russian National Media, 2013–2015) 313
Fig. 18.1 Representation of the current international sanctions situation in
the thesaurus form 329
Fig. 21.1 Prozhito. User interface 376
Fig. 21.2 Prozhito. Author page 377
Fig. 21.3 Prozhito. The page Pomos ̂’ (Help), where volunteers can learn how
they can contribute to the project 378
Fig. 21.4 Prozhito. A suggested page of a diary 379
Fig. 24.1 The ten topics covered in newspaper articles that discussed Yves
Montand’s 1956 tour of the Soviet Union 435
Fig. 24.2 The top eight topics in the Polish Życie Gospodarcze newspaper,
1950–1980436
Fig. 25.1 “Modernization” topic prevalence dynamic 456
Fig. 25.2 Projection of keywords on a two-dimensional space 459
Fig. 26.1 Neural network layers. (a) feed forward layer, (b) convolutional
building layer, (c) recurrent layer, (d) transformer layer 469
Fig. 26.2 Word2vec configurations. (a) continuous bag of words, (b)
skip-gram471
Fig. 27.1 A network in the MGPU producing large-scale plagiarism
(A. Abalkina, Dissernet.org). The full interactive graph is available
at: https://www.dissernet.org/publications/mpgu_graf.htm 491
xix
xx List of Figures
Fig. 27.2 The overall distribution of small-scale plagiarism across disciplines 495
Fig. 29.1 The seven bridges of Königsberg. Wikimedia Commons, https://
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:7_bridges.svg, licence: CC
BY-SA 3.0 518
Fig. 29.2 Extracted social networks of 20 Russian plays. Excerpt (left-upper
corner) from a larger poster displaying 144 plays in chronological
order (1747–1940s). Version in full resolution: https://doi.
org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12058179521
Fig. 29.3 Network graph for Ostrovsky’s Groza522
Fig. 29.4 Network sizes of 144 Russian plays in chronological order, x-axis:
(normalized) year of publication, y-axis: number of speaking
entities per play. Arrow indicates Pushkin’s “Boris Godunov.”
Russian Drama Corpus (https://dracor.org/rus) 526
Fig. 29.5 Network visualization of A. Pushkin’s Boris Godunov. Russian
Drama Corpus (https://dracor.org/rus) 527
Fig. 29.6 Network visualization of L. Tolstoy’s War and Peace530
Fig. 29.7 Network visualization of L. Tolstoy’s War and Peace, book 1 (first
part of the first volume) 531
Fig. 29.8 Network visualization of L. Tolstoy’s War and Peace, book 10
(second part of the third volume) 531
Fig. 29.9 Network visualization of L. Tolstoy’s War and Peace, epilogue 532
Fig. 29.10 Network densities of separate books (parts) of War and Peace532
Fig. 30.1 The structure of political communities on Twitter by event 543
Fig. 30.2 Clique size frequency distribution by community—Crimea sample 545
Fig. 30.3 Clique size frequency distribution by community—
Medvedev sample 545
Fig. 30.4 Influence of leaders’ content, distribution across quantiles 549
Fig. 30.5 Pro-government community reaction to Medvedev’s comment to
pensioners in Crimea 555
Fig. 30.6 Opposition community reaction of disbelief to Belykh’s guilt 556
Fig. 30.7 First and second quantile breakdown of account types by political
communities561
Fig. 30.8 Change in influence of leaders’ accounts when centrality
compliments the impact of their distributed content 561
Fig. 30.9 Tweet patterns for the two main communities, tweets per hour by
event562
List of Tables
Table 4.1 Main indicators of the national program “Digital Economy of

the Russian Federation” (2018) 58
Table 8.1 European Social Survey questions on various forms of activism
(European Social Survey Round 8 Data 2016) 141
Table 11.1 Religions and digital media normative expectations 192
Table 13.1 Classification of online retail platforms in Russia 226
Table 17.1 Russian National Corpus: texts by subcorpora 304
Table 17.2 Russian National Corpus: texts by creation date (the main
subcorpus only) 305
Table 17.3 Frequency of adjective decade constructions for each decade 307
Table 18.1 Types and examples of part-whole relations in RuThes 326
Table 18.2 Examples of conceptual dependence relations denoted as
nonsymmetrical associations in RuThes 328
Table 19.1 SNS use in Russia according to media research (October 2018,
in mil) 337
Table 22.1 Cumulative effect of using applications based on open data in
Moscow’s public transport system 404
Table 25.1 Top-30 semantic neighbors of the word modernizaciâ
(modernization) before and after January 1, 2012. Neighbors
appearing only in one list are highlighted 458
Table 26.1 Word embeddings for Russian 472
Table 26.2 Tools to train word embeddings 472
Table 26.3 Two examples of sequence labeling tasks 475
Table 26.4 Transfer learning models for Russian 477
Table 27.1 A source text (left) and the copy-pasted text after OCR (right) 486
Table 27.2 A source text (left) and the paraphrased text (right) 487
Table 27.3 A source text (left) and the translated text (right) 488
Table 27.4 Percentage of borrowing in dissertations defended at various
Russian institutions 496
Table 27.5 Differences in publication and citation performance among
authors demonstrating the highest and the lowest amount of
borrowing497
xxi
xxii List of Tables
Table 29.1 Number of co-occurrences of characters in A. Ostrovsky’s Groza

(abbreviated)521
Table 29.2 Graph-related values for five selected Russian plays 525
Table 29.3 Selected network metrics for five characters in A. Pushkin’s Boris
Godunov528
Table 29.4 Central characters in L. Tolstoy’s War and Peace ranked
according to three different centrality measures 530
Table 30.1 Six events and size of captured networks 541
Table 30.2 Density and transitivity of the network in its entirety and within
its main communities 545
Table 30.3 Leaders’ impact metrics using all data collected or focused on the
top 10k popular tweets 548
Table 30.4 Relative community sizes and standardized homophily indicators 554
Table 30.5 Duplication and similarity of content in two main communities
(% identical; % similar) 558
Table 30.6 Sample of “bot” communities detected (% identical; % similar) 558
Table 30.7 Botometer (Bot or Not) results (average universal probability of
automation; proportion of accounts no longer present two years
after samples were originally collected) 559
Table 30.8 Polarization of communities: retweets 560
Table 30.9 Polarization of communities: mentions 560
Table 30.10 Polarization of communities: replies 561
Table 32.1 Open datasets in Russian geoweb 589
CHAPTER 1
Digital Russia Studies: An Introduction
Daria Gritsenko, Mikhail Kopotev, and Mariëlle Wijermars
1.1 Area Studies Go Digital

The “digital” is profoundly changing Russia today. While in the mid-1990s less
than 1 per cent of the Russian population had Internet access, today Russia
ranks sixth globally with approximately 110 million Internet users, or three
quarters of the population (The World Factbook 2019). The proliferation of
affordable smartphones in the 2010s has made Internet access a common place
by 2020, with over 60 per cent of users connecting through mobile devices,
and Russia’s Internet market is the largest in Europe (GfK 2019). According
to the Russian Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass
Media, the Russian Internet industry amounted to an estimated value of five
trillion rubles in 2019, or 5 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product
(GDP) (TASS 2019). Taking into account the additional 25 million Russians
who live outside of Russia, it is no surprise that Russian is the second most
popular language on the Net after English (Historical trends 2019). These
figures alone make Russia an attractive object for researchers interested in the
The names of the authors are given in alphabetical order.
D. Gritsenko
University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
e-mail: daria.gritsenko@helsinki.fi
M. Kopotev
Higher School of Economics (HSE University), Saint Petersburg, Russia
e-mail: mkopotev@hse.ru
M. Wijermars (*)
Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands
e-mail: m.wijermars@maastrichtuniversity.nl
© The Author(s) 2021 1

D. Gritsenko et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Digital Russia
Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42855-6_1
2 D. GRITSENKO ET AL.
development of today’s digital society. The Russian information technologies

(IT) industry, moreover, is an ample provider of highly sophisticated digital
tools and well-organized software solutions: Nginx’s popular web server that is
used by, for instance, Netflix; Kaspersky antivirus software; optical character
recognition application ABBYY FineReader, to mention just a few. In Russian-
speaking markets, tech conglomerate Yandex furthermore successfully rivals
with Google, while social networking sites VK (formerly known as VKontakte)
and Odnoklassniki outperform their international competitor Facebook.
The global digitalization trend and the major societal shifts that accompany
the process of converting ever more information and communications into
digital form, challenge and transform existing practices across all spheres of life.
In many ways, the digital transformation Russia is undergoing is far from
unique. For example, the Russian government, similar to governments else-
where, actively develops digital strategies, looking to reform education, finances
and telecommunications and to increase governmental efficiency. Russian busi-
nesses seek to reap the benefits afforded by information and communication
technologies (ICTs) and big data as they operate in and expand into domestic
and global markets. Russian citizens, meanwhile, actively engage in the pro-
duction and consumption of web-based content, while their dealings with state
authorities increasingly occur through online e-government portals. New
trends and practices emerge in the arts, where literary authors experiment with
virtual personae and hyperlinked narration, while visual artists explore collab-
orative and cooperative online work and digital forms of expression.
At the same time, the impact of and responses to these digitalization prac-
tices in Russia are evidently context driven. The conservative and authoritarian
turn in Russian politics (Smyth 2016) during Vladimir Putin’s third presiden-
tial term (2012–2018), for example, has influenced not only the political, but
also the technological landscape. State attempts to control the online sphere
have materialized in various forms, including the regulation of data flows and
the blocking of access to unfavorable online content and unruly platforms.
Russia also exerts pressure on major domestic and international Internet com-
panies, for example to transfer personal data of Russian citizens to servers
located in Russia, and seeks to shape global Internet governance to reflect its
favored terms. At the same time, digital communications have created new
opportunities for the facilitation of civic resistance, as is evidenced by the suc-
cess of oppositional leader Alexei Navalny in rallying support and mobilizing
political resistance through his online activities.
For researchers investigating Russia, digitalization has resulted in the emer-
gence of a wealth of new (big) data sources, including social media and other
kinds of digital-born content that allow us to investigate Russian society in
novel ways. The accelerating speed at which Russian archives are being digi-
tized means that collections of research materials have become more easily
available, while simultaneously new methodological possibilities open up for
examining Russian historical sources with the help of digital tools. The abun-
dance of computational methods, ranging from simple automated keyword
sorting to complex machine learning algorithms, allow us to tap into the
1 DIGITAL RUSSIA STUDIES: AN INTRODUCTION 3
opportunities offered by combining different types of data that have not previ-
ously been used together, or to explore patterns in large datasets that are dif-
ficult to grasp with a “manual” approach.
Given the intricate combination of the universal and the particular in how
Russia is influenced by the digital as well as gives shape to digitalization trends,
and the specificities involved in the availability and use of digital sources and
methods, we argue that an area studies approach is both timely and productive.
Area studies, as we know them today, developed in American and Western
European universities in the second half of the twentieth century, when depart-
ments studying non-Western cultures welcomed sociology, economics, and
political science specialists to, together with language and literature scholars,
explore the contemporary social life of the regions they studied (Colonomos
2016, 65). The value of area studies, essentially a Cold War project striving to
provide a general framework to describe and explain what was going on in dif-
ferent parts of the non-Western world, be it the Soviet Block, the Middle East,
Africa, Latin America, or China (Rafael 1994), was increasingly questioned
after “the end of history” (Fukuyama 1989). The forces of globalization, the
third wave of democratization, and the worldwide triumph of the market econ-
omy were expected to diminish the value and necessity of studying an area,
with its emphasis on contexts; disciplinary knowledge was thought to be cen-
tral and contextualized “place knowledge” secondary. This volume asserts that
area studies, as a geographically and geopolitically motivated interdisciplinary
research domain, is of particular value to and can provide a general framework
for describing the variety of responses to digitalization and explaining the
mechanisms that assist or obstruct the domestication of global trends. In this
respect, we can build upon earlier efforts in this direction, such as the volume
Digital Russia: The Language, Culture and Politics of New Media
Communication (2014) edited by Michael Gorham, Ingunn Lunde, and
Martin Paulsen and the journal Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central
European New Media (digitalicons.org). Other area studies fields have similarly
turned their attention to digitalization. Consider, for example, the launch of
the Digital America journal in 2012 and publications such as The Other Digital
China by J. Wang (2019). All such emerging digital area studies initiatives, in
turn, draw upon and contribute to the by-now-established field of Internet
Studies, exemplified by, for example, The Oxford Handbook of Internet
Studies (2013).
The fact that digitalization started making major headline appearances
around the same time the post–Cold War end of history was declared is instruc-
tive for understanding how it came to be viewed (even though the process of
converting traditional forms of information storage and processing into the
binary code of computer storage can be traced back to the advent of comput-
ing after the Second World War). The ideals closely connected to the early
development of the Internet, such as freedom, decentralized control, the claim
of universality of technological development and so on, fitted well with the
overall narrative of global modernity (Dirlik 2003). Yet, during the past decade
we have witnessed backlashes on all “global fronts”—including democratic
backsliding, the rise of populism, the return of economic protectionism and

borders, first off- and then online—allowing area studies to make a comeback.
More than half a century of area studies scholarship has brought forward
important methodological accomplishments that turn out to be extremely use-
ful in approaching these global backlashes. First, the idea that context matters,
a staple in the disciplines of geography and anthropology, has been explicitly
brought into studies on economics, politics, and society through in-depth field
research. Area studies have routinely challenged the US- and Euro-centric
assumptions of many disciplines, while Szanton (2004) even argued that main-
stream disciplines are in fact special cases of area studies, American and
European Studies, respectively. Practices of place-based research that produce
contextually and culturally rooted explanations are useful if we seek to fully
understand questions of digital transformation.
Second, the multi- and interdisciplinary approaches that are inherent to
research projects in area studies have led to extensive conceptual borrowing,
cross-fertilization among disciplinary fields, and an emphasis on comparative
methodologies (Katzenstein 2001). Practical circumstances—colleagues work-
ing at centers for area studies are likely to have various disciplinary backgrounds
and area studies conferences bring together scholars working across the
humanities and social sciences—not only push individual scholars out of their
(disciplinary) comfort zone, but also provide ideas and nourish creative con-
ceptual development. This feature, we want to suggest, is invaluable for study-
ing digitalization across societies. Finally, language, which has been at the
center of area studies from its very inception, has been recognized “as produc-
tive and powerful in its own right” (Gibson-Graham 2004) and capable of
shaping social practices. Accentuating the performativity of language and the
power of discourse as a method for critical deconstruction, area studies have
been at the forefront of the so-called interpretative turn in the social sciences.
By the same token, language-based approaches—in particular computational
approaches—are among the backbones of digital studies.
Therefore, it makes sense to talk about Digital Russia Studies. Yet, a com-
prehensive volume that offers novice-friendly guidance for navigating the full
breadth of this new territory is currently lacking. To grasp the simultaneous
transformation of research object and research practices, this Handbook brings
together world-leading experts and emerging scholars to lead the way in the
emerging field of Digital Russia Studies. That being said, we are moving away
from the conventional label of Russian Studies to highlight that we aim to
contribute to and consolidate a methodological broadening in area studies:
Digital Russia studies focuses on the digital transformation of the (geographi-
cal) area of study, while digital Russia Studies indicates the use of digital sources
and methods in studying it and that is only partially captured by the term “digi-
tal humanities.” Together, Digital Russia Studies emphasizes how these two
research lines are intertwined, interdependent, and mutually reinforcing.
Drawing the borders of Digital Russia is no easy feat, even though it is clear
that it cannot be reduced to the digital projection of the state within its physical
borders. For one, many political and economic digital actors of significance are
located outside Russia, for example online media outlet Meduza that operates
from Latvia and Yandex N.V. that is registered in the Netherlands. Russian
services also operate in languages other than Russian and are not merely hosted
on the Russian .ru domain, but also on international domains (such as .com or
.edu) and the still functional Soviet .su domain. Russian Studies for the digital
era therefore deals with opaque, negotiable, and constantly moving borders—
material and virtual—that cannot be set once and for all, but rather require
careful consideration depending on the case-study, level of analysis, or specific
research application.
Aiming to present a multidisciplinary and multifaceted perspective on the
issues outlined above, the objective of this Handbook is twofold, as reflected in
its two-part structure. The first part of the book, Studying Digital Russia, pro-
vides a critical and conceptual update on how Russian society, politics, econ-
omy, and culture are reconfigured in the context of digitalization, datafication,
and the—by now—widespread use of algorithmic systems. Reviewing the state
of the art in scholarship on a broad range of policy sectors and issues, the chap-
ters investigate the transformative power of the digital and the particularities of
how these transformations manifest themselves in the context of Russia. The
chapters also reflect on societal responses to these ongoing transformation
processes.
The second part of the Handbook, Digital Sources and Methods, combines
two subsections that aim to answer practical and methodological questions in
dealing with Russian data. Digital Sources describes the main resources that are
available to investigate the multifaced Digital Russia sketched above: textual,
visual, and numeric. In addition, the vulnerabilities, uncertainties, legal and
ethical controversies involved in working with Russian digital materials are
addressed. The second subsection, Digital Methods, showcases examples of
cutting-edge digital methods applied in different fields of research. The chap-
ters provide a concise overview of the manifold opportunities for studying soci-
ety, politics, and culture in novel ways. The chapters also address the particular
methodological issues that researchers will encounter when working with
Russian data, such as working with Russian social media platforms and process-
ing sources written in Cyrillic rather than Latin script. The chapters in this
section demonstrate how the area studies tradition of invoking context as an
essential element of scientific explanation can leverage some of the criticism
that is being directed to the use of digital methodologies and big data in
humanities and social sciences research. In the remainder of this introduction,
we provide an overview of the topics, questions, and methods covered by the
contributions in this Handbook and briefly sketch the emergence of digital
technologies and networks in the region.
1.2 Studying Digital Russia

The first attempts to establish a national digital network in Russia can be traced
back to the late Soviet period and the never realized project called OGAS
(Obŝegosudarstvennaâ avtomatizirovannaâ sistema, All-State Automated
System). As is recounted by Benjamin Peters (2016), the story of OGAS is a
troubled one that ended in total failure due to the forces of Soviet bureaucracy,
effectively resisting innovations capable of jeopardizing state power, or the
positions of those in power. In the 1990s, local- and national-level networks
were overtaken by the expansion of the global Internet, emerging out of the
efforts of, for example, research institutions Conseil Européen pour la
Recherche Nucléaire (CERN) in Switzerland and the Institute for High Energy
Physics in Russia (Abbate 1999; Gerovitch 2002). Since then, global techno-
logical developments have followed similar trends, albeit at different paces; for
example, the transitions from low- to high-speed Internet, from wired to wire-
less access, and from expensive to affordable services offered by Internet service
providers. While the Internet was becoming more user-friendly, functional and
attractive all around, its social and political domestication in Russia had its
specificities: whereas many Western publicly available online services were
developed by IT geeks in garages, the Russian Internet, as legend has it, was
born in the kitchens of the intelligentsia. This local feature is sealed in the term
“Runet” coined from the words “Russian” and “Internet.”
The concept of Runet has evolved over the course of the past decades, along
with the object it describes, as Asmolov and Kolozaridi explain in their chapter.
Yet, in any circumstance it cannot be reduced to the .ru-domain or to online
content in the Russian language. In the late 1990s–early 2000s, when the con-
cept gained a foothold, Runet was defined as having two fundamental features:
it was logocentric and free. The first feature refers to the fact that many of
Runet’s forerunners had an interest in the arts and humanities:
The RuNet is specific with regard to the topic of literature: the myth of ‘literature-
centrism’ of Russian culture (almost dead, as it seems) has been resurrected on
the RuNet’s literary sites, which have no analogues in the other (national) seg-
ments of the Internet. (Konradova et al. 2006)
The first Runet websites, for example lib.ru, while technologically and
economically amateurish, were oriented toward the free distribution of infor-
mation and deeply rooted into the domestic cultural context. Many of these
features are still preserved in Runet today (see Chaps. 15 and 9), even though
it has become technologically advanced and market oriented, as the chapter
by O. Gurova and Morozova on digital consumption shows. Runet preserves
some of the spirit of freedom, although the legality of some of these activities
can be questioned (see Chaps. 7, 8 and Chap. 6). Digital technologies have
given a great impetus to innovation of the arts, as Strukov demonstrates in

his chapter. The Internet has also been instrumental in facilitating the expres-
sion and negotiation of gender identities, analyzed by Andreevskikh and
Muravyeva, and is leaving its mark on religious practices, as Khroul’s chapter
demonstrates.
In its early days, the Internet in Russia developed practically free from state
interference. As many sources testify (e.g. Babaeva 2015), soon-to-be president
Vladimir Putin hosted a meeting with representatives of the IT (information
technologies) industry on December 28, 1999, during which the sector was
promised a decade of free development. Limited state regulation and meddling
indeed was among the defining features of Runet for a considerable period of
time (e.g. the lack of effective online copyright protection), but the screws have
been steadily tightening, most rapidly from 2012 onwards, as is addressed in
multiple chapters in this volume (e.g. Chaps. 16, 8 and 2). The Russian Internet
has come under ever more direct and indirect control of the state, among others
in terms of extensive surveillance capabilities and prerogatives concerning digital
communications and the economic dependence of IT businesses. In 2019 alone,
there have been several milestone decisions that illustrate the extend of state
control over how the Internet develops in Russia. For example, the expansion of
5G network technology has been significantly delayed because of continued
resistance, among others by the Security Council of the Russian Federation,
against making the preferred frequency band available for civilian uses (the
3.4–3.8 GHz range earmarked for 5G use by, e.g. European Union [EU] coun-
tries, is currently used by the Russian military and security services), while Yandex
changed its corporate governance structure to accommodate governmental pres-
sure and avert the introduction of legislation limiting foreign ownership of major
Internet companies (Yandex N.V. is registered in the Netherlands).
While the Russian government has sought to counteract the freedoms previ-
ously afforded to the Internet through regulation and other control strategies,
the analyses in the first part of the Handbook make clear how it at the same
time recognizes the enormous potential of digital technologies. Indeed, the
Russian government frequently points toward digitalization as a cornerstone of
the country’s development. At the 2017 Saint Petersburg Economic Forum,
for example, Putin highlighted Russia’s place among the forefront of research
into artificial intelligence (AI):
Just like other leading nations, Russia has drafted a national strategy for develop-
ing AI technologies. It was designed by the Government along with domestic
hi-tech companies. (http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/60707, offi-
cial translation)
The federal government runs various programs to support digitalization

across sectors, such as government (analyzed by Gritsenko and Zherebtsov),
politics (discussed by Wijermars), law and justice (addressed by Muravyeva and
Gurkov), economy (examined by Lowry), and education (analyzed by Piattoeva
and G. Gurova). Billions of rubles from the federal budget have been invested
into infrastructure, making available many e-services, as well as an abundance
of administrative, legislative, archival, textual, geospatial data (explored in Part
II of this volume). As the chapters in this Handbook discuss in more detail, the
success of these federal programs is ambivalent. It is however undeniable that
the massive amount of data that is produced by various agencies as a result is
now available to experts and citizen scientists alike, enabling them to conduct
in-depth big data analyses, among others to reveal breakdowns in governance
(as is argued by Parkhimovich and Gritsenko, and Kopotev, Rostovstev, and
Sokolov in their respective chapters).
The ostensibly clear-cut image of Russia’s Internet status changing from free
to not free over the course of the past two decades, as is evidenced by annual
rankings of Internet freedom, therefore fails to tell the full story and its inher-
ent paradoxes. Manifold examples demonstrate how the Internet continues to
be instrumental for facilitating civic resistance, as Lonkila et al. recount in their
analysis. From this perspective, today’s digital dissidents can be seen as acting
in the vein of the Soviet intelligentsia, even though the two groups represent
different generations and values.
1.3 Digital Sources and Methods

The second part of the Handbook is diverse and of a more applied nature. It
starts with chapters discussing the most widely used digital sources, mainly
those for text-based studies that depart from the assumption that language can
be studied as a reflection of society. Collections of texts, or textual corpora, are
a key resource for linguistic studies as well as for a wide variety of applications
within the humanities and social sciences. Kopotev, Mustajoki, and Bonch-
Osmolovskaya describe these sources with a focus on the Russian National
Corpus (RNC), a deeply annotated and well-designed resource on the Russian
language, and the Integrum database, which comprises most newspapers, jour-
nals, and online media published in Russia or in Russian, as well as TV and
radio transcripts. Thesauri, for example the Russian RuThes thesaurus that is
discussed by Loukachevitch and Dobrov, are more sophisticated linguistic and
terminological resources for automatic text processing that can be used to
explore concepts, changes in word meaning, text categorization, and so forth.
More recently, social media have established themselves as a new channel of
communication and novel resource for studying a wide set of societal ques-
tions. In a chapter that focuses on assessing the applicability of existing models
of social media research in the Russian context, Koltsova et al. present the limi-
tations of existing approaches and suggest best practices for social media
research that uses Russian sources.
Two chapters are devoted to digital archives and digitized archival materials.
While all standard text-analytical techniques, both qualitative and quantitative,
can be applied to these materials, the contributions draw attention to questions
Another random document with
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indifferent if it had not been accompanied by another, which
suddenly brought the artist into the light, and was the success of the
Salon of 1874.
During his last holiday at Damvillers, Bastien-Lepage had
conceived the idea of painting the portrait of his grandfather, in the
open air, in the little garden which the old man loved to cultivate.
Grandfather Lepage.
By Jules Bastien-Lepage.
The grandfather was represented seated in a garden chair,
holding on his knees his horn snuff-box and his handkerchief of blue
cotton. His striking face stood out well detached from the
background of trees; the black velvet cap sloping jauntily towards his
ear gave effect to the shrewd Socratic face; his blue eyes twinkled
with humour; the nose was broad and retroussé; the white forked
beard spread itself over an ancient vest of the colour of dead leaves;
the hands, painted like life, were crossed upon the grey trousers.
Before this picture, so true, so frank, of such marvellous intensity
of familiar life, the public stood delighted, and the name of Bastien-
Lepage, unknown before, figured the next day in the first place in the
articles on the Salon.
II.
It was in front of this picture that I first met Jules. Having looked in
my catalogue for the name of the painter, I was delighted to find that
he was from the Meuse, and born at that same Damvillers where I
had once lived.
The heavy soil of our department is not fruitful in artists. When it
has produced one it takes a rest for a few centuries.
Since Ligier Richier, the celebrated sculptor, born at the end of the
fifteenth century, the Meuse could only claim credit for the painter
Yard a clever decorator of churches and houses in the time of Duke
Stanislas; so I was quite proud to find that Bastien-Lepage was a
fellow countryman of mine. A few moments later a mutual friend
introduced us to each other.
I saw before me a young man, plainly dressed, small, fair, and
muscular; his pale face, with its square determined brow, short nose,
and spiritual lips, scarcely covered with a blond moustache, was
lighted up by two clear blue eyes whose straight and piercing look
told of loyalty and indomitable energy. There was roguishness as
well as manliness in that mobile face with its flattened features, and
a certain cool audacity alternated with signs of sensitiveness and
sparkling fun and gaiety.
Remembrances of our native province, our common love of the
country and of life in the open air, soon established kindly relations
between us, and after two or three meetings we had entered upon a
close friendship.
The portrait of the grandfather had won for him a third medal, and
had ensured him a place in the sunshine.
It was not yet a money success, but it was a certain degree of
fame; he might go back to his village with his heart at rest, his head
high. The State had just bought his picture, La Chanson du
Printemps (The Song of Spring), and orders were beginning to come
in.
In 1875 Bastien-Lepage reappeared in the Salon with La
Communiante (The Communicant) and the portrait of M. Simon
Hayem, two excellent works which gave, each in its way, a new mark
of his originality.
The portrait of M. Hayem was best liked by men of the world;
artists were most struck by La Communiante.
The Communicant.
This young girl’s simple awkward bearing, as she stands out from
a creamy background, with all the stiffness of her starched white veil,
naïvely opening her pure hazel eyes, and crossing her fingers, ill at
ease in the white gloves, is a marvel of truthful painting. It reminds
one of the manner of Memling and of Clouet, though with quite a
modern feeling. It is interesting, as being the first of those small,
lifelike, characteristic portraits, in a style at once broad and
conscientious, which may be reckoned among the most perfect of
this painter’s works.
At the time of these successes in the Salon, Bastien joined in the
competition for the Prix de Rome. The subject chosen for 1875 was
taken from the New Testament—L’Annonciation aux Bergers (The
Annunciation to the Shepherds).
I remember as if it were yesterday that July morning when the
gates of the Palais des Beaux Arts were opened, and the crowd of
eager inquirers rushed into the hall of the competition.
After a few minutes Bastien’s picture was surrounded, and a buzz
of approval arose from the groups of young people gathered round
that work, so real, so strongly conceived and executed that the other
nine canvases disappeared as in a mist.
The artist had understood and treated the subject in a manner
utterly different from the usual style of the Academy. It was familiar
and touching, like a page of the Bible. The visit of the angel had
surprised the shepherds sleeping by their fire in the open air; the
oldest of them was kneeling before the apparition, and prostrated
himself in adoration; the youngest was gazing with half-closed eyes,
and his open lips and hands, with fingers apart, expressed
astonishment and admiration. The angel, a graceful figure, with
childlike almost feminine head, was showing with outstretched arm
to the shepherds, Bethlehem in the distance surrounded by a
miraculous halo.
This picture, which has both the charm of poetic legend and a
manly grip of real life, was executed with uncommon grace and
vigour; its very faults contributed to the realization of the effect aimed
at.
Most of those who saw this work of Lepage declared that he
would carry off the Prix de Rome with a high hand; yet the jury
decided otherwise. It was an older and more correct competitor who
was sent to the Villa Medicis at the cost of the State.
For a moment Bastien-Lepage was troubled and discouraged by
this decision. Not that he felt himself strongly attracted towards
Rome and Italian art, but he knew that many people judge of an
artist by his success. Among the people down in his province and in
his own family the Prix de Rome would have been considered as an
official recognition of his talent, and he regretted, above all, not being
able to give this satisfaction to his relations, who had undergone so
many privations in order to maintain him at Paris. That he did not
soon forget this unmerited check, we may gather from this fragment
of a letter to a friend:
“I learned my business in Paris, I shall not forget that; but my art I
did not learn there. I should be sorry to undervalue the high qualities
and the devotion of the masters who direct the school. But is it my
fault if I have found in their studio the only doubts that have
tormented me? When I came to Paris I knew nothing at all, but I had
never dreamed of that heap of formulas they pervert one with. In the
school I have drawn gods and goddesses, Greeks and Romans, that
I knew nothing about, that I did not understand, and even laughed at.
I used to say to myself that this might be high art; I wonder
sometimes now if anything has resulted from this education….”
However, he did not consider himself beaten. The following year,
at the same time that he was exhibiting his portrait of M. Wallon, he
went in again for the Prix de Rome competition. This time it was less
for his own sake than to give a satisfaction to his family and friends.
He did not enter with any real feeling into this competition, the
subject for which was: Priam suppliant Achille de lui rendre le corps
de son fils Hector (Priam begging Achilles to restore to him the body
of his son Hector). This picture, though a vigorous composition, tells
almost nothing of the deep and poignant emotion of this episode of
the Iliad.
Once more he failed to gain the prize, but this time he did not take
it much to heart. He was occupied with more absorbing prospects:
his last visit to Damvillers had bent his mind toward another ideal.
Whatever he might say, his studies in the school had not been
without their use to him. They had developed in him the critical
faculty. His repugnance to factitious and conventional art had driven
him with more force to the exact and attentive observation of nature.
At Paris he had learned to compare, and to see better. The
Meuse country, so little heroic, with its low hills, its limited horizons,
its level plains, had appeared to him suddenly more attractive and
more worthy of interest than the heroes of Greece and Rome. Our
labourers driving the plough across the field; our peasant women
with their large liquid eyes, prominent jaws, and widely opening
mouths; our vine-dressers, their backs curved with the labour of the
hoe, had revealed themselves to him as models much more
attractive than those of the atelier. It was a work for a great artist to
bring out the poetry pervading the village folk and their belongings
and to give it a real existence, as it were, by means of line and
colour. To represent the intoxicating odour of the mown grass, the
heat of the August sun on the ripe corn, the life of the village street;
to bring into relief the men and women who have their joys and
sorrows there; to show the slow movement of thought, the anxieties
about daily bread on faces with irregular and even vulgar features;—
this is human art, and consequently high art. This is what the Dutch
painters did, and they created masterpieces. Bastien, while lounging
among the orchards of Damvillers and the woods of Réville, resolved
that he would do as they had done, that he would paint the peasants
of the Meuse.
The list of studies begun or completed at this time shows us the
progress of this dominant idea: La Paysanne au Repos (The
Peasant Woman Reposing), La Prairie de Damvillers (The Meadow
at Damvillers), the two sketches for the picture Les Foins (The Hay),
Les Jardins au Printemps (Gardens in Spring), Les Foins Mûrs (Ripe
Grasses), L’Aurore (Dawn)—all these canvases bear the date of
1876.
It was in the autumn of the same year that we carried out a long-
talked-of plan for making an excursion together on foot into the
Argonne. I went to join him in September at Damvillers.
Thanks to him, I saw with a very different feeling the town that
formerly I thought so dull. Cordially and hospitably received in the
house at the corner of the great square, I made the acquaintance of
the father, with his calm, thoughtful face; of the grandfather, so
cheerful in spite of his eighty years; of the mother, so full of life, so
devoted, the best mother that one could wish for an artist. I saw what
a strong and tender union existed between the members of this
family whose idol and whose pride was Jules.
We set out along with one of my old friends and the painter’s
young brother. For a week we walked with our bags on our backs
through the forest country of the Argonne, going through woods from
Varennes to La Chalade, and from Islettes to Beaulieu. The weather
was rainy and unpleasant enough, but we were none the less gay for
that, never winking when the rain came down, visiting the glass-
works, admiring the deep gorges in the forests, the solitary pools in
the midst of the woods, the miles of green and misty avenues at the
foot of the hills.
Jules Bastien was always the leader. When we arrived at our
resting place in an evening, after a day of walking in the rain, he
almost deafened us with scraps of café-concert songs, with which
his memory was stored.
I seem still to hear in the dripping night that voice, clear and
vibrating, now silent for ever….
As we went along he told me of his plans for the future.
He wanted to tell the whole story of country life in a series of large
pictures: hay-making, harvest, seed-time, the lovers, the burial of a
young girl…. He also wanted to paint a peasant woman as Jeanne
d’Arc, at the moment when the idea of her divine mission is taking
possession of her brain; then, a Christ in the Tomb.
Together we made a plan for publishing a series of twelve
compositions: Les Mois Rustiques (The Months in the Country), for
which he was to furnish the drawings and I the text.
From time to time we stopped at the opening of a wood or at the
entrance of a village, and Jules would make a hasty sketch, little
thinking that the wild and simple peasants of the Argonne would take
us for Germans surreptitiously making notes of their roads and
passes. At Saint Rouin, while we were looking on at a Pilgrimage,
we had nearly been taken as spies. I have told this story
elsewhere.[1] The remembrance of it amused us for a long time.
After eight days of this vagabond life we separated at Saint Mihiel,
where Bastien wished to see the group of statues of the sepulchre,
the chef d’œuvre of Ligier Richier, before beginning his Christ in the
Tomb.
Shortly afterwards he gave an account of this visit in a letter to his
friend Baude, the engraver:
“Our too short walk through the Argonne has been very
interesting, and ended with a visit to the grand chef d’œuvre of Ligier
Richier at Saint Mihiel. You must see that some day. I have seen
nothing in sculpture so touching. France ought to know better and to
be prouder of that great Lorraine artist. You will see a photograph of
this masterpiece when you come to me….”
He had scarcely been six weeks at Damvillers again when he lost
his father, who was suddenly carried off by pulmonary congestion.
Death entered the house for the first time, and it was a rude shock
for a family where each loved the other so well.
“We were too young to lose such a good friend,” he wrote to me;
“in spite of all the courage one can muster, the void, the frightful void
is so great, that one is sometimes in despair….”
“… Happily remembrance remains (letter to M. Victor Klotz), and
what a remembrance it is! … the purest that is possible;—he was
goodness and self-abnegation personified; he loved us so!… What is
to be done? We must try to fill the void with love for those who
remain, and who are attached to us, always keeping in mind him
who is gone, and working much to drive away the fixed idea.”
And indeed he did work furiously: at Damvillers, at a Job that
remains unfinished, and at Paris at the full-length portrait of a lady,
which was exhibited in the Salon of 1877.
He had left the Rue Cherche Midi and had settled in the Impasse
du Maine, where his studio and his apartment occupied one floor of
a building, at the end of a narrow neglected garden, whose only
ornaments were an apricot tree and some lilac bushes.
His brother Emile, who just then came to an end of his study of
architecture in the school, lived with him.
His studio was very large, and was simply furnished with an old
divan, a few stools, and a table covered with books and sketches. It
was decorated only with the painter’s own studies and a few
hangings of Japanese material.
I used to go there every morning at this time to sit for my portrait.
I used to arrive about eight o’clock, to find Jules already up, but
with his eyes only half awake, swallowing two raw eggs, to give
himself tone, as he said.
He already complained of stomach trouble, and lived by rule. We
used to smoke a cigarette, and then he began to work. He painted
with a feverish rapidity, and with a certainty of hand quite
astonishing. Sometimes he would stop, get up and roll a cigarette,
would closely examine the face of his model, and then, after five
minutes of silent contemplation, he would sit down again with the
vivacity of a monkey and begin to paint furiously.
The portrait, sketched in during the snows of January, was almost
finished when the apricot tree began to put on its covering of white
flowers in April.
The Hayfield.
Immediately after the opening of the Salon, Bastien packed up his
baggage and fled to Damvillers to prepare for his great picture Les
Foins (The Hayfield), which occupied him all the summer of 1877,
and of which he gave me news from time to time.
“July.—I shall not say much about my work; the subject is
not yet sufficiently sketched in. What I can tell you is that I am
going to give myself up to a debauch in pearly tones: half-dry
hay and flowering grasses; and this in the sunshine, looking
like a pale yellow tissue with silver threads running through it.
“The clumps of trees on the banks of the stream and in the
meadow will stand out strongly with a rather Japanese
effect….”
“15th August.—Your verses are just the picture I should
like to paint. They smell of the hay and the heat of the
meadow…. If my hay smells as well as yours I shall be
content…. My young peasant is sitting with her arms apart,
her face hot and red; her fixed eyes seeing nothing; her
attitude altogether broken and weary. I think she will give the
true idea of a peasant woman. Behind her, flat on his back,
her companion is asleep, with his hands closed; and beyond,
in the meadow, in the full sun, the haymakers are beginning to
work again. I have had hard work to set up my first ideas,
being determined to keep simply to the true aspect of a bit of
nature. Nothing of the usual willow arrangement, with its
branches drooping over the heads of the people to frame the
scene. Nothing of that sort. My people stand out against the
half-dry hay. There is a little tree in one corner of the picture
to show that other trees are near, where the men are gone to
rest in the shade. The whole tone of the picture will be a light
grey green….”
“September.—Why didn’t you come, lazy fellow? You
would have seen my Hay before it was finished. Lenoir, the
sculptor, my neighbour in the Impasse, liked it. The country
people say it is alive. I have little more than the background to
finish. I am going to harness myself to the Reapers, and to a
nude study of a Diogenes the cynic, or rather, the sceptic….”
Les Foins was sent to the Salon in 1878. It had a great success,
though it was warmly discussed.
In the hall where it was placed, among the pictures which
surrounded it, this picture gave an extraordinary sensation of light
and of the open air. It had the effect of a large open window.
The meadow, half mown, went back bathed with sunshine, under
a summer sky, flecked with light clouds. The young haymaker sitting
drooping in the heat, intoxicated with the smell of the hay, her eyes
fixed, her limbs relaxed, her mouth open, was wonderfully real.
There was nothing of the conventional peasant whose hands look as
if they had never touched a tool, but a veritable countrywoman
accustomed from childhood to outdoor work. One felt that she was
weary with fatigue, and glad to breathe a moment at her ease, after
a morning of hard work in the sun.
This picture of life in the fields, so carefully studied, so powerfully
rendered, had a considerable influence on the painting of the day.
From the time of this exhibition many young painters, many foreign
artists especially, threw themselves with enthusiasm into the new
way opened out by Bastien-Lepage, and, without intention on his
part, the painter of the Meusian peasants became the head of a
school.
[1] See La Chanson du jardinier in Sous Bois.

III.
Bastien did not allow himself to be spoiled by success, but

continued his life of assiduous labour and conscientious research.
He divided his time between Paris and Damvillers, giving the larger
part to his village.
We have a long list of his works done in 1878 and 1879. Portraits
of M. and Mme. Victor Klotz and of their children, of MM. de
Gosselin, of M. A. Lenoir, of M. de Tinan, of the publisher George
Charpentier, of Emile Bastien, of Sarah Bernhardt, and lastly that
Saison d’Octobre, or, Recolte des Pommes de terre (October, or The
Potato Harvest) which is the companion picture to Les Foins (Hay).
This was in a graver key, with warm yet sober colours, and an
exquisite savour of the country in the late summer; it was powerfully
executed and full of health and serenity.
The portrait of Sarah Bernhardt and The Potato Harvest, less
discussed than The Hay, made a deep impression on the mass of
the public.
Sarah Bernhardt.
Dating from this time, Bastien’s success, both artistic and
monetary, was secure.
His first care was to let his friends at Damvillers join in his good
fortune.
They had been with him in his difficulties, they should now share
his pleasure, and he brought them to Paris in the summer of 1879.
He was happy to return to them, in all sorts of kind attentions, a little
of what he owed them for so much affectionate devotion. He was
grateful to them for having believed in him in his time of difficulty as a
beginner, and he experienced a tender pride in being able to show
them that they had not been mistaken.
When he received his first important gains he took his mother to a
large shop and had silks for dresses spread out before her. “Show
some more,” cried he. “I want Mama to choose the best.” And the
poor little mother, frightened at the sight of black satin that could
stand upright of itself, in vain protested that “she would never wear
that.” She was obliged to give way.
He took his grandfather through the avenues of the Bois and the
principal boulevards, expecting that he would be delighted; but in this
direction his zealous efforts failed utterly. The old man remained
indifferent to the splendours of Parisian luxury and to the scenery in
the theatres. At the opera he yawned openly, declaring that all this
commotion was deafening, and he went back to Damvillers
determined that they should never take him away again.
After having seen his people into the train for their return, he set
out for England, where he painted the Prince of Wales.
Decorated in the following July, he hastened to Damvillers to
show his red ribbon to his friends, and also to go on with the work he
loved best.
He had managed to arrange a studio in the spacious and lofty
granaries of the paternal house, and there he worked hard.
He hoped at last to realize his dream, so long deferred, of painting
a Jeanne d’Arc. He had meditated much on this subject, and we
have often spoken of it.
His idea was to paint Jeanne in the little orchard at Domrémy at
the moment when she hears, for the first time, the mysterious voices
sounding in her ears the call to deliver her country.
To give more precision to the scene, Bastien wished to show,
through the branches of the trees, the “blessed saints,” whose voices
encouraged the heroic shepherdess.
In this I differed from him. I maintained that he ought to suppress
these fantastic apparitions, and that the expression of Jeanne’s face
alone should explain to the spectator the emotion caused by the
hallucination to which she was a prey. I reminded him of the sleep-
walking scene in Macbeth: the doctor and the chamber-woman, I
said, do not see the terrible things that dilate the pupils of Lady
Macbeth, but from her face and gestures they know that there is
something terrible; the effect is only the greater, because, after
having perceived this, the imagination of the spectator increases it.
Suppress your phantoms and your picture will gain in sincerity and
dramatic intensity.
But Jules held to the personification of the voices, and our
discussions ended without either the one or the other being
convinced. Nevertheless, my objection had impressed him, and he
wanted to show his work to his friends before it was quite finished.
Joan of Arc Listening to the Voices.
“Come,” he wrote to me, about the 15th of September, “F. is quite
disposed to come; he really wants to come to Damvillers. Everything
will go beautifully. You will see my picture of Jeanne d’Arc well
advanced, and somebody coming from Paris will do me no harm….”
“If you knew how I work (letter to Ch. Baude) you would be less
surprised. My picture is getting on, and getting on well; all, except
the voices, is sketched, and some parts are begun. I think I have
found a head for my Jeanne d’Arc, and everybody thinks she
expresses well the resolution to set out, while keeping the charming
simplicity of the peasant. Also, I think the attitude is very chaste and
very sweet, as it ought to be in the figure that I want to represent; …
but if I am to see you soon, I prefer to leave you the pleasure of
surprise and of the first impression of the picture; you will judge of it
better, and you will be able to say better what you think of it….”
Jeanne d’Arc appeared in the Salon of 1880, with the portrait of
M. Andrieux. It did not produce all the effect that Jules expected. The
picture had its enthusiastic admirers, but also passionate detractors.
The critics attacked first the want of air and of perspective; then, as I
had foreseen, the voices, represented by three symbolical
personages, too slightly indicated to be understood, and yet too
precise for apparitions. But the public did not do justice to the
admirable figure of Jeanne, standing, motionless, quivering, her eyes
dilated by the vision, her left hand extended, and mechanically
fingering the leaves of a shrub growing near.
Never had Bastien-Lepage created a figure more poetically true
than this Lorraine shepherdess, so pure, so human, so profoundly
absorbed in her heroic ecstasy.
The rapid and brilliant success of the young master had ruffled the
amour propre of many; they made him pay for these precocious
smiles of glory by undervaluing his new work. He had hoped that the
medal of honour would be given to his Jeanne d’Arc; this distinction
was given to an artist of talent, but whose work had neither the
originality, nor the qualities of execution, nor the importance of
Bastien’s picture. He felt this injustice strongly and went to London;
there the reception and appreciation of English artists and amateurs
consoled him a little for this new mortification.
The two years that followed were fruitful in vigorous work of
different kinds: Les Blés Mûrs (Ripe Corn), the London Docks, The
Thames, Le Paysan allant voir son champ le dimanche (The
Peasant Going to Look at his Field on Sunday), La Petite Fille allant
à l’école (The little Girl Going to School); the portraits of M. and of
Mme. Goudchaux, of Mdlle. Damain, of Albert Wolff, and of Mme.
W., La Marchande de Fleurs (The Flower Girl); last of all, the two
great pictures Le Mendiant (The Beggar), and Père Jacques,
exhibited in the Salon in 1881 and 1882.
His stay in London and the reading of Shakspeare had inspired
him with the idea of painting one of the heroines of the great poet,
and in 1881 he went back to Damvillers full of a project for painting
the Death of Ophelia.
“I have been painting hard” (letter to Ch. Baude, August, 1881),
“for I want to go away and travel for two or three weeks. At the end
of September you will come and see us. That is settled, is it not?
Shooting, amusements, friendship. Since my return I have painted a
haymaker and worked at a little picture of an interior: The Cuvier à
Lessive (The Washing Kitchen); all the detail requires much time.
Besides I have begun and already advanced a large picture of
Ophelia. I think it will be well to do something as a contrast to my
Mendiant (Beggar). It is to be a really touching Ophelia, as
heartrending as if one actually saw her.”
“The poor distracted girl no longer knows what she is doing, but
her face shows traces of sorrow and of madness. She is close to the
edge of the water leaning against a willow; upon her lips, the smile
left by her last song; in her eyes, tears! Supported only by a branch,
she is slipping unawares; the stream is quite close to her. In a
moment she will be in it. She is dressed in a little greenish blue
bodice, and a white skirt with large folds; her pockets are full of
flowers, and behind her is a river-side landscape. One bank under
trees, with tall flowering grasses, and thousands of hemlock flowers,
like stars in the sky; and in the higher part of the picture, a wooded
slope; and the evening sun shining through birches and hazel
bushes; that is the scene….”
This picture was never finished. The landscape and flowers were
rendered as the artist wished, but the face and the costume of
Ophelia recalled his Jeanne d’Arc too much.
Bastien-Lepage no doubt saw this, and for this reason put the
picture on one side to return to his peasants.

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The Palgrave Handbook of Digital

Russia Studies Daria Gritsenko

The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies

The Palgrave Handbook of Paralympic Studies 1st Edition

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The Routledge Handbook of Developments in Digital

ISBN 978-3-030-42854-9 ISBN 978-3-030-42855-6 (eBook)

Cover illustration: FrankRamspott / gettyimages

Helsinki, Finland Daria Gritsenko

1 Digital Russia Studies: An Introduction 1

Part I Studying Digital Russia 13

2 The Digitalization of Russian Politics and

3 E-Government in Russia: Plans, Reality, and Future Outlook 33

4 Russia’s Digital Economy Program: An Effective

5 Law and Digitization in Russia 77

6 Personal Data Protection in Russia 95

7 Cybercrime and Punishment: Security, Information War,

8 Digital Activism in Russia: The Evolution and Forms of

9 Digital Journalism: Toward a Theory of Journalistic Practice

10 Digitalization of Russian Education: Changing Actors and

11 Digitalization of Religion in Russia: Adjusting Preaching to

12 Doing Gender Online: Digital Spaces for Identity Politics205

13 Digitalization of Consumption in Russia: Online Platforms,

14 Digital Art: A Sourcebook of Ideas for Conceptualizing New

15 From Samizdat to New Sincerity. Digital Literature on the

16 Run Runet Runaway: The Transformation of the Russian

Part II Digital Sources and Methods 297

17 Corpora in Text-Based Russian Studies299

18 RuThes Thesaurus for Natural Language Processing319

19 Social Media-based Research of Interpersonal and Group

20 Digitizing Archives in Russia: Epistemic Sovereignty and Its

21 Affordances of Digital Archives: The Case of the Prozhito

22 Open Government Data in Russia389

23 Topic Modeling in Russia: Current Approaches and Issues in

24 Topic Modeling Russian History427

25 Studying Ideational Change in Russian Politics with Topic

26 Deep Learning for the Russian Language465

27 Shifting the Norm: The Case of Academic Plagiarism

28 Automatic Sentiment Analysis of Texts: The Case of Russian501

29 Social Network Analysis in Russian Literary Studies517

30 Tweeting Russian Politics: Studying Online Political

31 The State of the Art: Surveying Digital Russian Art History569

32 Geospatial Data Analysis in Russia’s Geoweb585

Olga Andreevskikh is a PhD candidate at the University of Leeds, UK. Her

Galina Gurova is a researcher at the SKOLKOVO Education Development

Olessia Koltsova is an associate professor at the Department of Sociology of

sustainability. Her current project concerns wearable technology, particularly

Propaganda (Transcript Verlag, 2011, in German). She is a co-editor of

and Central European New Media (digitalicons.org). She is the author of

Table 4.1 Main indicators of the national program “Digital Economy of

Table 29.1 Number of co-occurrences of characters in A. Ostrovsky’s Groza

Digital Russia Studies: An Introduction

Daria Gritsenko, Mikhail Kopotev, and Mariëlle Wijermars

1.1 Area Studies Go Digital

The names of the authors are given in alphabetical order.

© The Author(s) 2021 1

development of today’s digital society. The Russian information technologies

backsliding, the rise of populism, the return of economic protectionism and

1.2 Studying Digital Russia

Helsinki, Finland Daria Gritsenko

1 Digital Russia Studies: An Introduction 1

Part I Studying Digital Russia 13

2 The Digitalization of Russian Politics and

3 E-Government in Russia: Plans, Reality, and Future Outlook 33

4 Russia’s Digital Economy Program: An Effective

5 Law and Digitization in Russia 77

6 Personal Data Protection in Russia 95

7 Cybercrime and Punishment: Security, Information War,

8 Digital Activism in Russia: The Evolution and Forms of

9 Digital Journalism: Toward a Theory of Journalistic Practice

10 Digitalization of Russian Education: Changing Actors and

11 Digitalization of Religion in Russia: Adjusting Preaching to

12 Doing Gender Online: Digital Spaces for Identity Politics205

13 Digitalization of Consumption in Russia: Online Platforms,

14 Digital Art: A Sourcebook of Ideas for Conceptualizing New

15 From Samizdat to New Sincerity. Digital Literature on the

16 Run Runet Runaway: The Transformation of the Russian

Part II Digital Sources and Methods 297

17 Corpora in Text-Based Russian Studies299

18 RuThes Thesaurus for Natural Language Processing319

19 Social Media-based Research of Interpersonal and Group

20 Digitizing Archives in Russia: Epistemic Sovereignty and Its

21 Affordances of Digital Archives: The Case of the Prozhito

22 Open Government Data in Russia389

23 Topic Modeling in Russia: Current Approaches and Issues in

24 Topic Modeling Russian History427

25 Studying Ideational Change in Russian Politics with Topic

26 Deep Learning for the Russian Language465

27 Shifting the Norm: The Case of Academic Plagiarism

28 Automatic Sentiment Analysis of Texts: The Case of Russian501

29 Social Network Analysis in Russian Literary Studies517

30 Tweeting Russian Politics: Studying Online Political

31 The State of the Art: Surveying Digital Russian Art History569

32 Geospatial Data Analysis in Russia’s Geoweb585