Digital Russia Studies: An Introduction

Ch. 1. P. 1–12.

Gritsenko D., Kopotev M., Wijermars M.

The “digital” is profoundly changing Russia today. While in the mid-1990s less than 1 percent 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 commonplace by 2020, with over 60 percent 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 "ve trillion rubles in 2019, or 5 percent 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 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

Keywords: Россия, Russian studies, digital humanities, цифровые гуманитарные науки

In book

The Palgrave Handbook of Digital Russia Studies

Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.