zavtra.ru_ru_2025

corpus
full corpus
Russian media
Russian language
Corpus based on the website of Russian weekly newspaper ‘Zavtra’ (in Russian, 1996-2024)
Author

Giorgio Comai

Published

July 28, 2025

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Browse an LLM-generated English-language summary of a sample of articles

Official release

Official release with DOI now available on Discuss Data:

Giorgio Comai (2025): zavtra.ru_ru - Full text corpus based on the website of Russian weekly newspaper ‘Zavtra’ (in Russian, 1996-2024), v. 1.1, Discuss Data, doi:https://doi.org/10.48320/EF3EBDDA-53CC-4078-88D9-BC9F3E7CF970.

Scope of this corpus

This corpus is based on the website of Russian weekly newspaper zavtra.ru.

The structure of the website suggests a strict correspondence between the online and the printed version: the website includes an archive with a separate section dedicated to each issue of the printed version of the newspaper. Archive pages show also which contents supposedly appear on which page of the printed version. Exact correspondence, however, has not been checked.

The website also hosts additional contents, such as podcasts, which are not included in this corpus. Only contents linked from the archive page of an issue of the newspaper are included in this corpus.

The earliest issue included in this corpus is issue 149, published on 14 October 1996. The most recent issue included in this corpus is issue 1 614, published on 31 December 2024.

Summary statistics

Dataset name: zavtra.ru_ru_2025

Dataset description: all items published on zavtra.ru

Start date: 1996-10-14

End date: 2024-12-31

Total items: 33 331

Available columns: doc_id; text; title; date; datetime; author; intro; tags; issue_year; issue_month; issue_number; id; url

License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

Link for download: zavtra.ru_ru_2025

field present missing missing_share
doc_id 33 331 0 0.0%
text 33 324 7 0.0%
title 33 330 1 0.0%
date 33 331 0 0.0%
datetime 33 331 0 0.0%
author 33 315 16 0.0%
intro 14 356 18 975 56.9%
tags 13 311 20 020 60.1%
issue_year 33 331 0 0.0%
issue_month 33 331 0 0.0%
issue_number 33 331 0 0.0%
id 33 331 0 0.0%
url 33 331 0 0.0%

Narrative explanation of how this textual corpus was built

Zavtra keeps a full archive of its publications starting from 1996. This corpus was built through a script that retrieves archive pages for each year (e.g. this for 1996), then retrieves the link to the page dedicated to each issue, and from there, extracts links to individual articles. Hence only articles attached to an issue are effectively included in the corpus.

The number of the issue in which each article supposedly appears is obtained based on the archive page where link to the given page was found (see below for potential issues).

Metadata such as author, date, and tags have been retrieved from the article page itself, based on relevant html tags. In particular:

  • title is retrieved from <div> of class header__title
  • date and datetime have been parsed from the <span> of class header__data
  • author is retrieved from <span> of class avtor-name
  • intro is retrieved from <div> of class header__anonse
  • tags is retrieved from <span> of class artags
  • text is retrieved from <div> of class article__content

Data quality issues

No major issues have emerged during extraction of text and metadata from the website.

As appears from the above graphs, fields such as “tags” and “intro” have been used somewhat consistently on the website only in the last decade.

Some minor issues are listed below:

  • especially in articles related to earlier years, title, date of publication, and issue number may be repeated at the beginning of the article itself
  • the date of publication included in such cases may be off by a few days in respect to the date of publication reported above the title
  • the issue number may also be off by one, e.g. this inline text makes reference to issue 228, but is linked from the archive page of issue 227.
  • a very small number of issues includes only one article

Here is an example showing all of the above issues.

Issue 227, available from the archive page related to 1998, includes only one article. This article, includes at the very beginning of its text the title, and then the following string: “15 (228) Date: 17–04–98”. This would suggest that the article was originally published on 17 April 1998 and belonged to issue 228. Yet on the very same web page, 13 April 1998 is presented as date of publication, and the article is linked from the archive page of issue 227.

Metadata in this corpus consistently rely on website metadata, hence would keep these latter points of reference, and ignore metadata included within the text itself.

As the difference is only of a few days, these issues are likely of negligibile impact for analyses looking at long term trends, but should be kept in consideration by researchers for whom exact date of publication is of the essence. Time of publication (hour and minute) should probably be disregarded for earlier years: the 3.00am time of publication reported for many articles is probably just an artifact of importing contents from previous versions of the website, which may have assumed GMT as the default time. Again, as these are the metadata currently visible online, they have been dutifully included in the published corpus, but should be looked at with caution.

The vast majority of newspaper issues includes between 15 and 30 articles (see histogram below). In a small number of cases, as mentioned above, only one article is included in each issue. This may or may not hint at missing articles (perhaps, these were actually published as double issues, and the lone remaining article has been mis-attributed to an effectively non-existent issue). No additional checks have been conducted on these outliers.

License information

At the time contents were retrieved, the footer of zavtra.ru made clear that all contents are available under a Creative Commons license:

Все материалы сайта доступны по лицензии: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

The contents of this dataset - zavtra.ru_ru_2025 - are distributed in line with this license. To the extent that it is possible, the corpus itself is also distributed by its creator, Giorgio Comai, with the same CC-BY license, as well as under the Open Data Commons Attribution license (ODC-BY).

Dataset cleaning and reordering

The following columns have been added to the original dataset before exporting:

  • introduce an id, based on the row number after reordering for issue number; this is used for reference, and does not necessarily represent order of publication
  • introduce a doc_id column (composed of the website base url, the language of the dataset, and the id) and set this as the first column of the dataset

Consistency check with previous version of this corpus

There are some minor inconsistencies with the previously published dataset, due to the fact that a few items disappeared from the on-line version of the website. They are three in total: a poem, an article about an artist, and an advertisement related to investments that probably was not supposed to appear on-line in the first place. Supposing there’s reason for them to be taken offline, and the reason does not seem to be research-relevant, they are dropped from the updated version of the corpus.

The id of items remains however consistent across versions of this corpus.

Besides, the text of a few dozens articles differs slightly between the two versions of the corpus. In the vast majority of cases, this seems to be related to small adjustments and polishing of metadata (especially in older article, metadata could be repeated inside the text, and this has now been adjusted on Zavtra’s website). In a small number of cases, this is related to more consistent adjustments: for example, a few paragraphs of introduction have been added to this 2004 interview (see e.g. older version on the Internet Archive, as well as the newer version with added text in bold).

Overall, these seem to be minor differences, unlikely to have substantive impact for any research-relevant task. These may however lead to minor inconsistencies in the figures generated with different versions of the corpus, in particular those based on relative word frequency: if the total number of words published in the course of a given year, for example, changes by a few hundreds, then relative word frequency may well result in a slightly different figure.

Additional options for exploring the data

Why LLM-generated summaries

For readers unfamiliar with Zavtra, especially those who do not read Russian, it may be difficult to get a first impression of the thematic focus of the articles and the writing style. The fact that titles of publications are often not descriptive, makes it more difficult to skim through them and get a feeling of the thematic priorities of the editors, as well as the tone and style characteristic of the magazine.

An English-language collection of pre-compiled LLM-generated summaries of a random sample of articles makes it easy to skim through the contents and get a meaningful first impression. Even if the dull style of LLM-generated articles does not fully convey the stylistic verve or the scathing or sarcastic criticism of public figures often found in Zavtra articles, it does offer an meaningful overview of both contents and style. It also allows to get a glimpse of the thematic priorities, including a long-term preoccupation with Russia (as a nation, understood in civilisational terms, more than short-term issues), the prevalence of opinion pieces, the attention to the arts, etc.

As is characteristic of LLMs, these summaries may include inaccuracies.

Relevant scholarly publications

In the book “The Rise of the Russian Hawks”, Faure (2025) highlights the centrality of Zavtra, its founder and director, and the cultural circles that developed around it, for debates around ideological debates in contemporary Russia.

Faure, Juliette. 2025. The Rise of the Russian Hawks: Ideology and Politics from the Late Soviet Union to Putin’s Russia. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009542661.

For the connection between Zavtra and the Izborsky Klub, see in particular Laruelle (2016)

Laruelle, Marlene. 2016. ‘The Izborsky Club, or the New Conservative Avant-Garde in Russia’. The Russian Review 75 (4): 626–44. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43919640