My dissertation examines how citizens in authoritarian regimes with tight ideological control respond to periods of political upheaval. Specifically, it focuses on book trade in Russia before and after the start of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Using natural language processing tools and combining novel data from book abstracts and internet searches, I explore how the invasion reshaped the space of political ideas in Russia, as reflected in the supply of and the demand for books in history and social sciences. Methodologically, the project develops a new approach to capturing trends in public opinion in data-sparse contexts.
