Russia’s open-data regression

Freedom of information rights arrived late in Russia. In the decade since Putin returned to office, they’ve deteriorated.

According to estimates from the project To Be Exact, at least 10 Russian government agencies have removed data from open sources since the war began. Retrieving a record from the Unified State Register of Real Estate now requires permission from the property owner, and Russia’s Finance Ministry plans to allow over 1,300 companies not to publish any information about themselves in the public domain — “to counter sanctions,” according to officials. Since 2012, the Moscow-based nonprofit Information Culture has been one of the main organizations advocating for information transparency in Russia. Its director and cofounder, Ivan Begtin, told Meduza about the decline of open data policies in Russia.

For much of the world, the twentieth century gave rise to what’s known as the first wave of open data. National governments passed laws allowing journalists and the public to access federal government records, such as the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. And while there were no searchable online portals, citizens of a number of countries achieved the right to see the information that had been collected using their tax dollars. In some places, that right was established even earlier — public access to official records was a core tenet of Sweden’s 1766 Freedom of the Press Act.

Russia’s first law giving citizens access to public information wasn't passed until 2009 — firmly into the second wave of the global open data movement. “I sometimes joke that the best period for open data in Russia was when Vladimir Putin was prime minister,” said Information Culture director Ivan Begtin. “At that point, there was an illusory sense of hope that the government was trying to reform the whole process.”

Just as the U.S. and the UK had created data.gov and data.gov.uk, government agencies in Russia started opening public data portals of their own. “Data transparency was developing fairly quickly. [...] Russia even surpassed international trends in some areas,” said Begtin. An advisory board, the Expert Council under the Government, was created as part of the Open Government Partnership initiative.

Then, in 2014, it all began to disappear. According to Begtin, that’s because much of the information transparency infrastructure that appeared during the Medvedev era was aimed at advancing some key foreign policy goals. In particular, Russia’s leaders wanted to join the OECD, for whom information freedom is a priority.

“In 2013, at the G8 summit, Putin and other G8 leaders signed an open data charter,” said Begtin. “[But] after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, Russia was expelled from the G8 and its OECD accession process was de facto suspended.”

Begtin said that in the years leading up to 2014, expanding public records access fit the government’s domestic agenda as well as its foreign one: by creating new institutions dedicated to government transparency, it could appease “middle-class people in Moscow and St. Petersburg who went to protest rallies” by absorbing them into the new structures. Since the Kremlin’s OECD dreams died, though, there’s been no reason to keep up the charade.

“Some things vanished instantly, while others have deteriorated over the course of eight years,” said Begtin. “[...] They were replaced by imitations. For example, regulation.gov.ru is an imitation of [true] interaction with citizens. Whereas in the beginning, citizens could discuss laws on education, policing, and fishing [with the Expert Council there].”

Losing ground

Believe it or not, journalists and anti-corruption activists are not the intended beneficiaries of Russia’s surviving open data policies — their work is just a "side effect," according to Ivan Begtin. In fact, most of the portals and registries used by investigators like Navalny’s team are in place to keep the business sector running.

To illustrate this point, Begtin used the Unified State Register of Legal Entities (EGRYuL). In 2020, information about the founders of Russia's NGOs suddenly disappeared from the site. “Let’s say I’m the head of an NGO and want to get a loan from a bank,” said Begtin. “[Now,] the bank will request a record from the EGRYuL and won’t find me nor any other founders there. As a result, they might deny my application; after all, what if one of the founders is a terrorist or someone with outstanding debt?”

But the removal also shows that journalists do have an impact on the authorities' thinking. “Russia has over 200,000 registered NGOs,” said Begtin. “Of course, the decision to revoke access to information about their founders wasn’t made in a vacuum. It happened after several groups of investigators found that certain NGOs belonged to people with ties to people the investigators suspected of corruption.”

In recent years, the decay of Russia’s open data portals has been a slow process. That’s because they’re fairly inexpensive to keep around, and in the absence of orders to do otherwise, government employees keep them updated simply due to inertia.

Since late February, though, the authorities have begun removing specific information with renewed urgency.

“You can open the site of any large government corporation or private company that’s been sanctioned, and you'll see that the information about its board members has completely disappeared — the page is just gone,” said Begtin.

He believes that in addition to doing all it can to avoid helping other countries enforce sanctions, the Russian government also has another factor in mind: the public perception of the war’s economic fallout.

“In addition [to records about company board members], financial information has begun to disappear — for example, data about budget expenses, which used to be published regularly by the Federal Treasury. Now, they’ve stopped publishing certain monthly reports,” said Begtin. “[This is because] the authorities want to avoid causing panic among the population and among businesses.”

The global open data movement is now in its third wave, the goal of which is to get governments to publish small datasets that will materially benefit citizens, or what's known as “publishing with purpose.” This is in contrast to the second wave, when advocates called for all public data to be “open by default,” leading to unwieldy datasets in some cases and unresponsive governments in others. Russia, meanwhile, is still having trouble securing the right demanded in the global first wave: the ability to request and receive specific information.

“By [Russian] law, you have the right to request information, even if it’s classified. But also by law, there’s nothing preventing state agencies from simply refusing to give it to you. They can tell you that the information is confidential, or that they don’t have it,” said Begtin. “The information request process has practically collapsed in the last 10 years, and everything has reached the point that the authorities don’t owe anybody any information.”

Begtin envisions a radically different approach to data transparency. If Russians had access to a wide array of information about medicine, education, crime, and the environment, rather than just annual government reports with country-wide statistics, he said, it would change the way people live. “That data would allow a person to make a decision about moving to a new place, to take care of his health, to choose the best school for his children, or to go to the police and ask for a security camera to be installed in an unsafe area,” he said.

In 2016, the Kazakh government began tracking crime and publishing the data online. “Few people know about it,” he said, “but it’s unique in the post-Soviet space. Mexico has been publishing data about the quality of education in every school since 2013. In Russia, that’s never even been suggested.”

But at the moment, Begtin and his colleagues at Information Culture are focused on a more urgent task: archiving the materials published by newly banned media outlets before they get removed. “Our task is to do as much as we can in the current situation to ensure that knowledge isn’t lost,” he said. “We need to think of the historians that will study this era.”

Interview by Margarita Lyutova

Abridged translation by Sam Breazeale