Russia's top physicists and mathematicians were put to work on a system to monitor Russians' reactions to Putin's decisions
Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, photographed during a visit he made on June 2, 2025 to the National Center for Physics and Mathematics in Sarov, PHOTO: Dmitry Astakhov / Zuma Press / Profimedia Images
Russia is developing a system to monitor citizens' “social and psychological reactions” to government decisions, Igor Kalyaev, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and head of a department at the Southern Federal University in Rostov, announced, quoted by The Moscow Times.
The platform will monitor and evaluate how “online communities” respond to “socially significant events,” he explained. Among other things, the system will allow “the identification of trends and anomalies in the psycho-emotional responses of online communities, the assessment of psycho-emotional tension and the identification of evidence influencers that influence the mood of communities through their messages”, reports the financial channel RBC.
Work on the platform is being carried out at the National Center for Physics and Mathematics (NCPM), located in the closed city of Sarov in the Nizhny Novgorod region, as part of a program called “AI and Big Data”.
With a population of around 93,000, Sarov is one of Russia's so-called “closed” cities, a status inherited from the Soviet era and maintained to this day for national security reasons. The city is home to the Russian Federal Nuclear Center (RFNC-VNIIEF), Russia's main center for the development of nuclear and thermonuclear weapons – the Russian equivalent of Los Alamos in the US. Nuclear warheads, detonation technologies, strategic weapons models, etc. are designed and tested there (at the theoretical and simulation level).
Entry into the city is permitted only with special authorization, and foreigners are only allowed access in extremely rare cases with federal approvals.
Until the Russian researchers have time to finish the system
Kalyaev said the plan is to eventually make the system available to officials in the single-industry towns of Rosatom, Russia's nuclear agency, as well as other company officials. The implementation deadline is until 2030.
Kalyaev noted that he installed a prototype of the system for “test operations” in the Sarov administration and at the Department of Communications and International Relations of the RFNC-VNIIEF.
Kalyaev also stated that, upon completion, the project will provide “a large-scale automated decision support system for identifying and analyzing online community reactions, which will improve the quality of management decisions and public satisfaction with policies implemented at the local or federal level.”
The government decree establishing the NCFM was signed in 2021 at the direction of President Vladimir Putin. The center specializes in fundamental and applied sciences in astrophysics, nuclear physics, artificial intelligence, supercomputers and quantum technologies. The scientific and experimental base of the center is the Russian Nuclear Center – VNIIEF, which is part of Rosatom.
