Lecture by Ekaterina Schulmann on How to Study a Closing Country: Expertise in Time of Official Secrecy, Data Distortion, and Propaganda

ONRS on film

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On 21 June 2025, ONRS had the honour of hosting Ekaterina Schulmann for a lecture titled “How to Study a Closing Country: Expertise in Times of Official Secrecy, Data Distortion, and Propaganda.”

Ekaterina Schulmann is a leading Russian political scientist known for her work on legislative processes, bureaucratic systems, and decision-making in modern autocracies, with a particular focus on Russia. Since relocating to Berlin in 2022, she has become a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center and teaches political science at the Osteuropa-Institut, Freie Universität Berlin. Prior to her move, she held academic positions at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences and the Russian Presidential Academy, where she led the Center for Legislative Studies. She is the author of several books in Russian and a contributing co-author to The New Autocracy: Information, Politics, and Policy in Putin’s Russia (2018).

This talk should be of interest not only to political scientists, but to anyone who follows Russian politics. Just a few of the questions addressed:

– What did the system learn from the 2022 mobilisation? – How many people actually live in Russia? – What brings down authoritarian regimes?

Key message of the lecture: “Russia is not ‘a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’. It can — and should — be studied by rational methods.”