The Inter-Regional Electoral Network of Assistance in Russia (IRENA) is a country-level project focused on fostering the democratic electoral processes in Russia as a whole and in Russia’s federal units (regions). In order to achieve the above-stated overall objective of the project, we establish a sustainable inter-regional network providing assistance within the area of electoral campaigning, thus filling a glaring gap in Russia’s political infrastructure. The IRENA combines the educational and scientific resources, and the experience of practitioners working in the area of electoral monitoring to develop technical infrastructures and logistical schemes facilitating democratic electoral processes, and to adapt regional elections’ organisation and actors to international norms through analysis, development, and communication.

The project is funded by the European Union within the framework of the European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights and implemented by the Autonomous Non-Commercial Organization of Information, Expert and Consulting Services Center in Support of Democracy and Human Rights Helix (Helix Center).

The leader of the project team is Doctor of Political Sciences, Professor Grigorii V. Golosov. He authored many publications in English.  A more complete list of publications, including hyperlinks to the Internet versions of some of the Russian-language books and articles, can be found here. Iulia Shevchenko also published in English.

The main products of the IRENA project are for the internal consumption of the Russian public and other stakeholders in free and fair elections, and these products are available only in Russian. However, we believe that there is one product that may be interesting for the western publics, especially in the academy. This is the Russian Electoral Statistics Database placed at this site. Everybody who has ever dealt with the existing publications of Russian electoral statistics by the Central Electoral Commission of Russia (http://www.cikrf.ru and http://www.izbirkom.ru) knows how user-unfriendly these publications are. At any given moment of time, they are also incomplete because some of the data tend to disappear without stating a reason or leaving a trace soon after the elections. To remedy these obvious shortcomings, Professor Golosov with the assistance of Dr Shevchenko created a database that is attempted to combine user-friendliness with the comprehensiveness of the data. The data sources include the publications of the Central Electoral Commission and regional electoral commissions in the http://www.izbirkom.ru portal, the Internet sites of those regional electoral commissions that keep them on their own (the list of these sites is provided at the bottom of this page), and print publications. The database includes all national and regional elections held in Russia starting with December 2003, and it is updated no less frequently than twice a year. The municipal elections (including mayoral) are not included.

The database is in Russian. However, the interested English-speakers who know Cyrillic characters and can recognize the names of regions and political parties (almost all the rest is in numbers) will not find the language barrier prohibitively high. In order to facilitate their effort, we provide a user guide in English.

Regional electoral commissions:
Chelyabinsk
Chukotka
Chuvashia
Khanty-Mansi
Komi
Krasnoyarsk
Novgorod
Orenburg
Perm
Primorsky
Pskov
Sverdlovsk
Tambov
Tomsk
Tver
Voronezh
Yamalo-Nenets

These and all other regional electoral commissions also hold internet sites in the http://www.izbirkom.ru system. See their Internet-addresses at http://www.cikrf.ru/cikrf/sites/.