Participants will gain hands-on experience with a wide range of methods, including text data analysis, administrative data research, integration of AI and large language models into the research process, and survey data design and evaluation under the specific constraints of Russia. These skills can be applied to pressing research problems such as analyzing political, social, and economic attitudes under authoritarian conditions from tracing the internalization of state narratives within populations to examining Russia’s strategic decision-making. More broadly, they open new pathways for uncovering empirical evidence in contexts where conventional fieldwork is restricted or impossible.