Moscow concentrates its municipal digital services in a single government portal, mos.ru, first launched with a handful of online services in 2011. Over the following decade it became the main channel through which residents reach the city administration, and in the UN's 2018 e-Government Survey it topped a pilot ranking of 40 cities' municipal websites, scoring 55 of 60 indicators. Usage figures for the portal are large but self-reported by the city. This atlas covers Moscow's e-government layer specifically, keeping to what independent bodies have assessed.
The atlas documents 6 projects in Moscow, the earliest dating to 2011: 1 with a documented success, 5 still running without a verdict. Every entry carries an evidence grade — the strongest here is peer-reviewed (1 entry) — and links its sources.
Three entries that show what Moscow is actually doing.
Computed from the 6 entries below — a profile, not a score.
Moscow's digital government is genuinely large and genuinely well-rated. The city's mos.ru portal has been the single gateway to municipal services since its first digital services launched in 2011, and in the United Nations' 2018 e-government survey Moscow ranked first of the forty cities assessed in a pilot index scoring municipal websites, taking 55 of 60 indicators. The city reports more than 3.7 billion cumulative uses across 15.8 million registered accounts. From November 2012 it began charging for street parking, starting on a couple of dozen streets and extending to everything inside the Garden Ring within a year, then outward in waves. Enforcement was automated from the start: more than a hundred camera cars had been reading number plates at speed since that April. In the fleet's first months the city issued 108,212 tickets — and how many were paid was disputed threefold, with the traffic police saying about 60 per cent and a motorists' campaigner saying one in five.
The fare card came next and turned out to be a supply chain. Troika launched in April 2013 and became the backbone of ticketing across metro, buses, trams, bike hire and paid parking; the mayor's office reported 36 million cards sold in the first eight years and more than nine in ten metro trips paid with them. A virtual version lived in the major phone wallets until sanctions following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine broke that layer, and the war also cut the card's imported chip supply. Moscow opened a domestic chip-module production line in December 2023 and reported 2.78 million fully Russian-made cards issued by January 2025 — presented as a milestone, arrived at as import substitution.
From 2019 the city built the two systems that define its record, and both turn on whether anyone outside can check the result. Moscow has run its own online voting system, separate from the federal platform, since a pilot that September — a system whose encryption cryptographers broke twice during its public pre-election testing. In the 2021 State Duma election, candidates backed by the opposition led in eight of the city's fifteen districts on paper ballots; the online tally appeared the next morning and reversed the outcome in every one. A technical audit found the online vote recorded more ballots received than issued and concluded the published data could not reproduce the official result. By 2024 about 71 per cent of Moscow voters were voting online, observers documented a simultaneous surge of electronic votes across Russia's time zones at a single minute, and the city made electronic terminals the default at polling stations with paper on request.
In January 2020 Moscow switched on live facial recognition across a camera network then just past 100,000 units, heading for around 200,000. The legal challenge failed early: an activist went to court after learning cameras had identified her at a protest, and the courts dismissed the cases in 2019 and 2020 without examining the system's legality. What is documented since is what a network without a working veto produces — protester identification, and by one monitor's count 595 cases of facial recognition used against dissenters since 2021, including the identification and arrest of people who attended Alexei Navalny's funeral. In October 2021 the same technology reached the turnstiles as Face Pay, letting riders who enrol a photo pass by looking into a camera at more than 240 stations, with more than 100 million biometric rides by April 2024. Enrolment is voluntary; being scanned by the network is not. The independently documented figure for that product is not a ridership number but 141 preventive detentions of activists identified in the metro since February 2022 — riders intercepted before any protest took place.
On a time axis, by the year each one started — 2011 to 2021. Pick a dot to read what it was.
✔ Every published entry is checked against the public sources it cites before publication.
Editorial links between Moscow's own entries — the city as a system, not a list.
Plans and announced trajectories — not yet documented results.
Moscow is the most heavily instrumented city in this atlas whose instruments cannot be checked from outside, and that is a finding rather than an accusation: each entry above rests on the city's own reporting except where an independent monitor, a cryptographer or a court record exists, and those are the entries that disagree with it. The online voting system is the standing counterexample to the only test that matters for an electronic ballot, which is whether an observer can recompute the published result — broken before its first election, irreproducible in 2021, anomalous again in 2024, and now the default at the terminal. The camera network's character was set when courts declined to examine its legality rather than by any technical decision, and the fare product built on the same cameras shows why the consent boundary is the network and not the enrolment form. The one measurable question left open by ordinary means is the parking system's, where issuance was never collection and the two published estimates of the payment rate still differ by a factor of three.
Where Moscow appears in the atlas's own analysis.
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Smart-city projects in Moscow, Russia.” The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/cities/moscow/ (last verified 2026-08-28). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.