Public interest in Russia and China has increased in the last decade, and experts on their politics are often asked to explain current events. Who are the members of these expert communities? What are their social structures? And can the public trust them? After all, experts on authoritarian regimes did not anticipate either the fall of the Soviet Union, or the emergence of the so-called Arab Spring. As China and Russia close themselves off and information from the ground becomes more difficult to access, should we be worried that experts will turn to their peers for information instead, which may lead the community to fall prey to echo chamber effects? Over the last years, we have used a snowballing nomination process to collect information on over 2500 China experts, surveying more than 600 of them. We have used the network of nominations to analyze the social structure of this community. Our research revealed that male academics who are both US-based and US-educated continue to form the core of this community, but younger cohorts appear to be more diverse in terms of educational background, gender, and geographic location. We also found network structures that may be conducive to echo chamber effects: experts tend to nominate peers with the same geographic and professional background as themselves, and – for a small subset that signed two opposing open letters – those who provide similar policy advice. This paper presents preliminary findings from a similar and ongoing survey of more than 1000 Russia experts. In contrast to the China experts survey, we have also asked respondents to assess Russia’s current political and economic situation, allowing us to measure more directly whether experts tend to recommend those who share their views. Comparing the network structures of the two communities will also allow us to better distinguish features and structures inherent in expert networks from characteristics typical for one of the two communities: in particular, we will explore if the US plays a similar important role for the location and education of this community, and examine the diversity of Russia experts in terms of their gender and geographic location. We want to know if the Russia watcher community has a similar global reach across all five continents, and how experts within and outside academia are connected and represented in that network. Finally, we are curious if the geographic and professional sub-communities differ in their assessments of Russia’s political and economic situation.

The manipulation of information through propaganda is one of the main mechanisms used by modern dictators to ensure regime stability. Some authoritarian rulers manage to stay in power not so much by preventing the masses from rebelling, but by eliminating the desire to do so, by shaping the flow of information to appear popular to the majority of the population. The Prigozhin mutiny is a striking example of how state propaganda failed to prevent an organized group, such as the Wagner mercenaries, from staging a mutiny within a highly personalized authoritarian regime. According to traditional perspectives on coup-proofing, such a regime should be relatively immune to such a challenge. Prigozhin resorted to mutiny—a strategic form of communication of last resort—because other forms of public communication failed to resolve the escalating conflict between Prigozhin and Russia’s military leadership. In this paper, we argue that it was precisely the growing discrepancy between state propaganda and the relatively uncensored Telegram that fueled the desire to rebel. We use text-as-data computational social science methods including dictionary-based text analysis and sentiment analysis as well as topic modeling to analyze two original data sets: Transcripts from three state propaganda channels Rossiia-1, Pervyi Kanal, and NTV, and all messages (video, audio and image data was transformed to text data for quantitative analysis) posted by Prigozhin’s press service on Telegram between February 24, until the end of August 2023. By focusing on elite dynamics, we show that until the mutiny, state TV adopted a propaganda strategy of “distraction” (i.e., largely ignoring Prigozhin and his complaints), while Prigozhin’s rhetoric on Telegram gradually escalated, culminating in the mutiny as a major communication failure. Only after the mutiny was crushed did state propaganda shift to an “attraction” model, while Prigozhin fell silent. But Prigozhin’s escalating rhetoric also likely contributed to the mutiny’s swift end: We empirically show that throughout 2022 and 2023, Prigozhin consistently used anti-elite frames and outright threats, which in turn reduced the risks of elite defections from the Putin regime during the mutiny. The paper makes several contributions to the propaganda and comparative authoritarianism literature by focusing on the risks rather than the stabilizing function of propaganda, by analyzing signaling directed at elites rather than the population at large, and by zooming in on a militaristic and equally authoritarian actor rather than a pro-democracy opposition.

This paper develops a comparative framework for analysing how brokerage shapes the adaptive capacity of authoritarian political economies under external pressure. Drawing on original network data on Russian elite actors, it identifies and empirically traces three distinct sectoral modes of adaptation brokerage through which state-linked elites mediate engagement with the global economy: technocratic–financial brokerage (Kirill Dmitriev and the Russian Direct Investment Fund), technological outsider brokerage (Arkady Volozh and Yandex), and personalist resource brokerage (Igor Sechin and Rosneft). Methodologically, the paper combines large-scale text mining of Russian-language media, quantitative social network reconstruction, descriptive statistics, and process tracing to map the evolution of these brokerage networks across the pre- (2010–2013) and post-Crimea (2014–2020) periods, the COVID crisis (2020–2022), and the war period (2022–2025). This design enables systematic comparison of how sectoral position, political embeddedness, and network structure condition adaptation outcomes under escalating geoeconomic constraints. The comparison reveals pronounced variation in adaptive trajectories. Dmitriev’s financial networks exhibit high flexibility, repeatedly repurposing institutions for new economic and diplomatic functions under sanctions. Volozh’s globally integrated tech networks prove fragile, collapsing once foreign exposure collides with domestic repression. Sechin’s resource-based networks display durability, leveraging entrenched rents and personalist ties to secure continuity, albeit with limited transformative capacity. By linking brokerage type to adaptive outcome, the paper challenges monolithic accounts of authoritarian resilience and demonstrates that adaptation rests on a differentiated portfolio of sector-specific brokerage strategies. It thus foregrounds cross-border and domestic networks as critical infrastructures of authoritarian adaptation in a fragmenting global order.

In recent years, Russia has transformed from an "informational" or "modern" authoritarian regime that relied mainly on persuasion, propaganda, manipulation, and targeted repression, into an authoritarian regime that resembles classical "fear dictatorships". While the transformation is arguably still not complete, repression has increased dramatically, particularly in the preparation and the aftermath of the country's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In this process, the regime's propagandists have reached new heights of aggressive and vulgar language to attack the country's alleged enemies inside and outside the country. At the same time, the regime has attempted to maintain an impression of normal life and prefers to portray the war as a "special military operation", conducted by professionals, that ordinary citizens have little contact with. The starting point of this paper is therefore the diagnosis of the parallel existence of aggressive radicalization and "pacification" (Vlasova 2024). In this study, I ask (1) whether this pattern can be traced in public language of state media and the Kremlin's propagandists, (2) whether there is evidence of it spreading to other parts of the population, or (3) whether indeed the regime reacts to societal discoursive shifts as much as it shapes them. To this end, I use methods of text analysis on a large data set compiled from state-owned or state-controlled media and from social media between 2010---the year before the post-electoral protest wave that startled the regime---through 2025. The focus of the analysis lies on the way in which violence in general and state violence in particular is depicted, legitimized, and aestheticized. I hypothesize that the public has been increasingly subjected to depictions of violence since the regime's interference in Eastern Ukraine in 2014, peaking after the full-scale invasion, and that this led to a normalization of violent language in online public discourse. At the same time, I expect this trend to be continuously broken by attempts of the regime to create an impression of tranquility.

The manipulation of information through propaganda is one of the main mechanisms used by modern dictators to ensure regime stability. Some authoritarian rulers manage to stay in power not so much by preventing the masses from rebelling, but by eliminating the desire to do so, by shaping the flow of information to appear popular to the majority of the population. The Prigozhin mutiny is a striking example of how state propaganda failed to prevent an organized group, such as the Wagner mercenaries, from staging a mutiny within a highly personalized authoritarian regime. According to traditional perspectives on coup-proofing, such a regime should be relatively immune to such a challenge. Prigozhin resorted to mutiny—a strategic form of communication of last resort—because other forms of public communication failed to resolve the escalating conflict between Prigozhin and Russia’s military leadership. In this paper, we argue that it was precisely the growing discrepancy between state propaganda and the relatively uncensored Telegram that fueled the desire to rebel. We use text-as-data computational social science methods including dictionary-based text analysis and sentiment analysis as well as topic modeling to analyze two original data sets: Transcripts from three state propaganda channels Rossiia-1, Pervyi Kanal, and NTV, and all messages (video, audio and image data was transformed to text data for quantitative analysis) posted by Prigozhin’s press service on Telegram between February 24, until the end of August 2023. By focusing on elite dynamics, we show that until the mutiny, state TV adopted a propaganda strategy of “distraction” (i.e., largely ignoring Prigozhin and his complaints), while Prigozhin’s rhetoric on Telegram gradually escalated, culminating in the mutiny as a major communication failure. Only after the mutiny was crushed did state propaganda shift to an “attraction” model, while Prigozhin fell silent. But Prigozhin’s escalating rhetoric also likely contributed to the mutiny’s swift end: We empirically show that throughout 2022 and 2023, Prigozhin consistently used anti-elite frames and outright threats, which in turn reduced the risks of elite defections from the Putin regime during the mutiny. The paper makes several contributions to the propaganda and comparative authoritarianism literature by focusing on the risks rather than the stabilizing function of propaganda, by analyzing signaling directed at elites rather than the population at large, and by zooming in on a militaristic and equally authoritarian actor rather than a pro-democracy opposition.