Russian Contentious Events Dataset for News and Social Media (RCED-NSM)

The Russian Contentious Events Dataset for News and Social Media (RCED-NSM) is a structured, event-level dataset of protest events in Russia spanning the years 2000 to 2025. It combines coverage from six distinct source types: GDELT, Russian-language news articles retrieved via Google Search API, VKontakte (VK) public community posts, Telegram public channel posts, and two Russian print newspapers (Izvestia and Vechernyaya Moskva). It is one of the few protest event datasets to integrate both news and social media sources for a non-Western national context. It is the main result of the work presented in "Automating Protest Event Analysis Using Digital Media in Contentious Politics".

Each row represents a single source document- a contentious event report. Each report describes at least one protest event. In this current version, the dataset contains 20,509 rows and 17 columns after deduplication and quality filtering. All source texts, originally in Russian, have been replaced by machine-generated English summaries stored in the `text_content_summary` column. Named entity recognition was applied to extract structured event metadata, including event date, geographic location, participant names, organisations, participant counts, detentions, and violence descriptors, where possible and successful.

A more detailed description is in the codebook. This version is different from the RCED dataset since it uses a different combination of sources.