The Russia Monitor

Today I am happy to present to my readers a new tool on TRM - a Russian laws search engine.  The search engine combines several of the best online sources of laws, decrees, regulations, and legislation into one convenient search platform.  Unfortunately, only Russian-language sources are available for free.  If you want an example of how easy it is, type in 57-ФЗ, which is the Federal Law number for the Strategic Sectors Law.  You can see it comes up right away.  Note that you can find related materials (e.g., regulations, amendments) if you search for a phrase unique to a given law.  For example, in the case of the Strategic Sectors Law, the phrase "стратегическое значение" is relatively unique and brings up both the law and related materials.  If you are more interested in searching by topic, that works as well (just try searching for "коррупция").

I hope some of you find this useful - let me know if you have any questions or suggestions.  I also created a stand-alone site with just the search engine which is here.  Finally, I did not include one Russian government site because it's formatting made it impossible.  It's the Kremlin's new documents site, which I recommend checking out.

Update:  So I made some adjustments so that users will hopefully be successful in their searches.   First, I added more sites with high-quality and readily available versions of laws.  For those who don't know, the sources you get at Rossiiskaya Gazeta (rg.ru) are 'official' and are sufficient for a citation in a scholarly work.  I also added the database for the Arbitrazh court system in Russia, and I'll try to add the criminal and constitutional courts today.  Finally, I've provided contextual filters you can use after the initial search to drill down to the best results.  Again, let me know your feedback - and thanks to those of you who sent emails.  I will probably put this on a better, stand-alone website to which I could also eventually move my blog.