The name Olimpiy Kvitkin is not known to many people. But his fate illustrates why a platform like Discuss Data – a repository for archiving, sharing and discussing research data on Eastern Europe, South Caucasus and Central Asia – is needed today more than ever since the fall of the USSR.
Kvitkin was Stalin’s leading statistician, responsible for the Soviet census of 1937. When Kvitkin presented the census data, he disagreed with Stalin, who spoke of a “growing populace”. Kvitkin’s data showed the opposite: a population decline of several million people, above all due to the man-made famine that killed millions in Soviet Ukraine (“Holodomor”) and Kazakhstan (“Asharshylyk”). Kvitkin paid for his opposition to Stalin with his life.
In today’s successor states to the USSR, honest statisticians are no longer murdered. However, their work – and that of social scientists working with and relying on accurate data – is made much more difficult in increasingly authoritarian environments, where the space for academic freedom is shrinking. Scientists are under surveillance, increasingly oppressed, sometimes even jailed. The Central Asia Barometer, a crucial source for researching public opinion in the region, suspended its work due to “growing insecurity”. Official Russian statistics are censored and manipulated. This makes it hard, sometimes impossible, to obtain reliable, trustworthy data on political, economic and social developments. Examples range from rigged election results, censored data on state budgets or doctored mortality statistics, including during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2022, Russian authorities concealed more than 400 previously accessible official datasets, in 2024 another 385.
Discuss Data (https://discuss-data.net/) tries to counter this trend. Launched in September 2020, the platform is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and operated by the Research Centre for East European Studies (FSO) at the University of Bremen and Göttingen State and University Library.
Discuss Data was born from two ideas: firstly, to provide a “safe haven” for research data on and from the countries in Eastern Europe, the South Caucasus and Central Asia. This is in line with the mission of the FSO, which was founded in 1982 as a research centre for Soviet samizdat literature, and nowadays hosts one of the “most outstanding” archival collections in this field. As the political situation in many post-Soviet states deteriorated and research is under threat again, Discuss Data builds on the FSO’s tradition and long-established networks with institutions and researchers in the region, and helps them to safely store and archive their data – out of reach from their authoritarian governments. In doing so, Discuss Data is always looking for solutions on an equal footing with our partners.
The second intention was to establish an interactive, community-led platform where like-minded researchers working with data can not only archive, publish and share their data, but also exchange ideas and discuss questions such as data quality, validity and reliability – all in one place. A dashboard, similar to that of social networks, provides registered users with news about what’s happening on the platform and thus encourages interaction and discussions about data quality issues, which helps to counter the spread of false data.
While other repositories such as Harvard Dataverse are better-known and significantly larger than Discuss Data (which currently has around 220 datasets), they usually offer core functions, such as long-time archiving and data sharing. It is its innovative community-centred and dialogic approach that makes Discuss Data unique: all datasets are assigned to several main categories, which are curated by experienced scholars from the research community working on the topics they curate. The curators review all datasets submitted in their respective categories and thereby ensure the quality of the data and check for its reusability: every dataset published on Discuss Data comes with detailed documentation that is needed for secondary usage of the data.
To make the datasets more visible, since 2024, all open access datasets have been additionally archived with Zenodo, where Discuss Data has its own community. Zenodo, operated by CERN and funded by the European Commission, is a major European research output infrastructure and is the mandatory repository for many EU-funded projects.
As of early 2025, datasets on protests, social policy, civil society and security issues constitute the majority of the data collections on Discuss Data. Most of them are available in open access. Due to fruitful institutional partnership with the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) and the Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Foundation (DIF), a large number of datasets with public opinion surveys from Ukraine have been published in the public opinion category since 2024. Survey data on other countries and regions are available as well, including Levada Center data on Russia and the above-mentioned Central Asia Barometer. Examples of other interesting datasets are a term frequency analysis of Duma speeches, the Maidan Oral History Archive, a dataset on protest actions in Belarus in 1997-2020, and the monitoring of labour protests in Kazakhstan.
A relatively new feature on the platform are “data reviews” of datasets that are not published with Discuss Data. The reviews allow the addition and discussion of datasets that are available on third-party sites, which are linked in the review. Thus, Discuss Data aims to make data on our core categories more visible, even if the dataset is hosted on a different platform.
Apart from providing a safe haven for research data, Discuss Data also aims to train early career scholars in Research Data Management (RDM). For this purpose, in 2025, Discuss Data conducted the first DiscussDataLab, which aimed to bring young researchers closer to RDM best practices such as the FAIR data principles. Discuss Data also offers a limited number of grants for scholars to enable them to prepare their data according to our best practices and publish it in open access on the platform. To keep in touch with the community and provide updates on new datasets and reading recommendations, Discuss Data offers a free newsletter and has a Bluesky account (@discussdata.bsky.social).
The idea of archiving, publishing, sharing and discussing research data on a single hub has convinced other scholarly communities to follow suit. Discuss Data is currently developing new “Community Spaces” that will provide the same services to the German Digital Humanities community and the international community working on Soviet dissent and samizdat. The source code of the Discuss Data platform is published under an open source licence. Other scholarly communities and networks can thus use the software to build on the work of Discuss Data and establish their own Community Spaces.
