Russia

What the record shows

Every national record in this atlas has a characteristic source of independent evidence. In Canada it is auditors general; in the United States, transport safety investigators and the courts. In Russia it is human-rights monitors, exiled newsrooms and academic cryptographers — people the state is prosecuting or has driven abroad. That is not a stylistic observation about the entries below; it is the finding. Where the operator's own numbers are plentiful and the institutions that would normally test them are not available, what can be checked at all determines what the record can say.

The entry that makes this concrete is Moscow's online voting system, which the city has run separately from Russia's federal platform since a 2019 pilot. Cryptographers Pierrick Gaudry and Alexander Golovnev broke its encryption twice during public pre-election testing, before it had counted a single real ballot. In the 2021 State Duma election, opposition-backed candidates led in eight of Moscow's fifteen districts on paper; the online tally appeared the next morning and reversed the result in every one. A technical audit collated by the Russian Election Monitor found the online vote had recorded more ballots received than issued — 2,021,969 against 1,943,590 — and concluded the published data could not reproduce the official result. By March 2024, with about 71 per cent of Moscow voters online, Novaya Gazeta Europe documented a simultaneous surge of electronic votes across Russia's time zones at 9:30 Moscow time, and The Bell reported Vladimir Putin polling 76.8 per cent at physical stations against 89 per cent online. The test of an electronic ballot is whether an outsider can recompute the result from the data they are shown; this is the atlas's standing counterexample.

Moscow also holds the atlas's clearest demonstration that a payment product and a surveillance system can be the same camera. Face Pay switched on at more than 240 metro stations in October 2021, letting an enrolled rider pass the turnstile by looking into a lens; enrolment is voluntary, every other payment method remains, and the operator reported more than 100 million biometric rides by April 2024. Running alongside it, the citywide recognition network went live in January 2020 across just over 100,000 cameras. The distinction that matters is not the product but the veto. When activist Alyona Popova went to court after cameras identified her at a protest, Moscow courts dismissed the cases in 2019 and 2020 without examining the system's legality — and what the monitors have documented since is what a network without a working veto produces: OVD-Info has counted 595 cases of facial recognition used against dissenters since 2021, including 141 preventive detentions of activists picked out in the metro after the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, riders intercepted before any protest took place, and Meduza reported the technology being used in March 2024 to identify and arrest people who had attended Alexei Navalny's funeral.

The sanctions that followed the invasion also produced this atlas's plainest lesson about fare cards as supply chains. The Troika card launched in 2013 and became the backbone of Moscow ticketing — valid on metro, buses, trams, bike hire and paid parking, and by the city's own account carrying more than 90 per cent of metro trips within eight years. Two of its layers were imported. The virtual Troika lived in Google Pay and Samsung Pay until the phone-wallet layer broke, and the chips came from abroad until they did not; Moscow opened a domestic chip-module line in December 2023, and a deputy mayor reported 2.78 million fully Russian-made cards issued by January 2025. The city presents that as a milestone. It is more precisely the price of the exposure — a card that had been quietly transnational, rebuilt at cost after the transnational part was withdrawn.

Where the record predates the war it reads more like the rest of the atlas. Moscow's paid parking zone began on roughly two dozen streets in November 2012 and was enforced automatically from the start by a fleet of more than a hundred camera cars reading plates at 40 km/h. Its numbers make the familiar point that issuance is not collection: 108,212 tickets in the fleet's first months of automated fines, and a threefold disagreement about what was actually paid — traffic police put it near 60 per cent, a motorists' activist at one in five. The zone had the boundary problem every priced cordon has, with residents barricading courtyards against drivers fleeing the charged streets. The mos.ru portal is the city's single service gateway, and its best-known distinction needs care: it ranked first of the forty cities in the UN's 2018 pilot Local Online Services Index, which is a statement about a field of forty and not about the world.

One entry here is not from Moscow, and the contrast is the point. In Novosibirsk, the regional generating company has spent more than 515 million rubles since 2021 digitising the city's heat network, opening a dispatch centre in September 2025 that watches pressure, temperature and flow from sensors on hundreds of thermal points; the operator reports that the time to locate and fix a network defect roughly halved, from about nine hours to under four, and two independent regional outlets corroborate it. It is an unglamorous, checkable, pipes-and-sensors result of the kind that fills the Nordic and German pages of this atlas — and it is the only Russian entry of its type here. If the entries below agree on one lesson, it is that the instruments in Russia are conventional and the accountability around them is not: the same cameras that speed up a commute identify a mourner, and the ballot that cannot be recomputed is counted anyway.