Western studies of the Soviet Union had quite a weak empirical base. The available information was limited to a few sources. Official statistics, meanwhile, were often unavailable or distorted. These distortions were often not intentional, but rather a consequence of the specific reporting indicators published by the state. In 1975, the British economist Charles Goodhart showed that the statistics used for reporting were increasingly unreliable. Information from Soviet newspapers could not be considered reliable either, since even officially the press was viewed as an “organ of agitation and propaganda.” Consequently, information about socioeconomic problems was kept quiet, with the outward picture reflecting the priorities of the country’s leadership.

There was virtually no way for a Western researcher to communicate with a person living in a rural area (estimated at 25% of the population in the 1970s) or a factory worker in a small town (estimated at another 25% during the same period). Foreign scholars could only guess and speculate, aside from following changes in the country’s top political leadership. Still, pioneering work by Australian historian Sheila Fitzpatrick and her followers made significant strides in understanding daily life in the Soviet Union, as well as the social and cultural changes in the Soviet Union. But the vast majority of experts and scholars never saw the collapse of the USSR coming and proved unable to offer effective policies to forestall the formation of authoritarian regimes across most of the former Soviet Union.

Everyday practices and choices are resilient, stable and provide sufficient data on society and how the administrative apparatus works. Most importantly, studying everyday life helps to deal with the problem of political censorship.

These everyday practices and preferences can be gleaned by studying social media, still accessible in most semi-closed countries for both citizens and researchers. It contains information about daily experiences, regular activities, relationships, etc. Social media is often monitored by governments, and citizens can get punished for posting there, but the topics, including their emotional coloring and dynamics over time, tell us a lot about the society being studied.

Note that simply reading social networks gives us little or nothing. By burying herself in selected channels or pages, the researcher creates an information bubble for herself, and social media algorithms reinforce the bubble. As a result, the analysis becomes one-sided. Meanwhile, machine methods for analyzing social networks, being representative and independent, make it possible to understand how life works in a particular country and how citizens might behave in the event of certain changes.

Other tools are more efficient than social media. Some open data remains available in semi-closed societies as an important tool for the top leadership to control lower-level institutions. If information flows vertically, then at each rung higher it can be distorted. For instance, if every court has to post all its decisions publicly, then judicial statistics are more difficult to distort.

Working with open data allows us to reconstruct many trends in the functioning of state organs.

Moreover, applied and academic research not related to official politics continues to be conducted in most semi-closed countries. Consumer practices, educational preferences, employment patterns, etc. contain information that is important for understanding what is going on there. This type of data allows us to understand the real structure of society and people's preferences.

Combined, all these tools make it possible to study semi-closed societies without traditional methods. In fact, if we look at the academic and expert communities of these societies themselves, we see they are now following that very path.