How has Russia been studied by political scientists, economists, and scholars in cognate fields who publish in specialized area-specific journals studied Russia? To systematically analyze the approaches employed in Russian studies over the last decade, I collected all publications (1,097 articles) on the country from the top five area studies journals covering the territories of the former USSR, the top 10 journals in political science, and the top five journals in economics from January 2010 to January 2022 and classified them based on the methods they utilized, empirical focus, and sub-fields within method. In this article, I discuss the results of this classification and the pitfalls associated with over-reliance on some methods over others, notably those that include self-reported data, in the context of Russia’s war against Ukraine and the increasingly repressive domestic environment under Putin’s autocracy. I also propose some ways of addressing the new realities of diminished access to data and fieldwork.
Keywords: Russia, Russian Studies, methods, surveys, survey bias, economics, political science