Plurality in the Russian-speaking world

No Russian translation of the current edition of the book *Plurality* has been found. What has reached Russian readers is a translation of an early outline, coverage in cryptocurrency media, and Vitalik Buterin's own writing. The contrast with Russia's state-built systems of "participation" offers a useful point of comparison.

Voting online on the theme of a guided tour of a park, or on whether to mow the grass in a courtyard: in Moscow, the city has run a system like this since 2014. In bringing citizens' voices into politics through digital tools, it looks similar to the ideas of Plurality, the book by Audrey Tang (Одри Тан in Russian) and E. Glen Weyl (Глен Вейл). So how has this book been read in the Russian-speaking world?

In short

As of October 2026, no Russian translation of the current edition of Plurality has been found [1]. What has reached Russian readers is little more than the Russian version of an outline published in 2022 [2], introductions in cryptocurrency media, and Vitalik Buterin's writing in Russian. The book's reach there can be said to be still thin.

Russia, on the other hand, has state-built systems of "participation", such as electronic surveys and electronic voting, and much has been written in Russian criticizing them [3][4]. This difference offers a point of reference when comparing them with Plurality.

For example

The Russian version of the 2022 outline. The 2022 outline Plurality: Technology for Collaborative Diversity and Democracy has a Russian version, Плюральность: технология коллективного разнообразия и демократии. The authors are given as "Одри Тенг и Е. Глен Вайл", and the translator field is empty. It was on the earlier plurality.net, and the original document is published under CC0 (a form anyone may use freely) [2].

Buterin on a future Russia (February 2026). Buterin, the founder of the cryptocurrency Ethereum, wrote in Russian on X (formerly Twitter) about his thoughts on Russia after peace. The Russian edition of The Moscow Times reprinted this in its opinion section, noting that it had left the style unchanged and only corrected the spelling [5]. There Buterin discussed what roles ideas of «децентрализованной политики» (decentralized politics) such as quadratic voting, zero-knowledge proofs (ZK, technology for proving that something is correct without revealing its contents) and Polis could play, both in the system of an ideal, peaceful Russia and in the opposition's activities today [5].

A DW panel on the "digital iron curtain" (June 21, 2022). At an event of DW, Germany's international broadcaster, Tang joined a panel online from Taipei, alongside Leonid Volkov of the team of Alexei Navalny and Maria Makeeva, editor-in-chief of OstWest, a Russian-language TV channel in Berlin [6]. Volkov said that on the eve of the September 2021 parliamentary election, Google and Apple gave in to demands from the Russian authorities and removed the team's voting app. Tang compared the fact-checking system to contact tracing for an infectious disease. She said that in Taiwan, instead of taking posts down, they build people's ability to learn together [6].

In more detail

No translation yet

Among the copies (forks) of the book's original repository, only one had a name that looked Russian (a provisional count by this site, October 2026). But it contains only the English and Traditional Mandarin texts [1]. The source of the book's website registers a language code for Russian, but there is no translated content [1]. A Russian edition of Radical Markets, the earlier book by Weyl and Eric Posner, has also not been found in the several catalogs searched.

Cryptocurrency media have carried the content

The Russian texts closest to the book's content have mainly come from cryptocurrency media. In 2023 ForkLog, with the permission of the publisher Individuum, ran one essay from Больше денег, the Russian translation of a collection of Buterin's essays. That essay also touches on quadratic voting [7]. Incrypted has also translated an essay by Buterin that touches on discussion tools such as Pol.is [8].

The Russian version (2019) of an essay by the economist Branko Milanović introduced Posner and Weyl's quadratic voting as one proposal for weighted voting of the one-person-n-votes kind [9]. → Quadratic voting · Vitalik Buterin

How the press wrote about Tang

There are not many Russian-language articles centered on Tang. Several of them are Russian editions of foreign public broadcasters. In 2019 Switzerland's swissinfo called Tang "министр цифровых технологий" (minister of digital technologies) and introduced the civic participation platforms vTaiwan, Join and others. In that article Tang said that elections for mayors or the president are not held online [10].

In June 2023, TASS (ТАСС), which Russian-language Wikipedia describes as Russia's state news agency [11], wrote of Tang as "глава тайваньского ведомства по цифровизации" (head of Taiwan's digitalization agency) [12]. Its article on Tang's visit to London reported that the Chinese embassy in the UK said the meeting violated the "one China" principle, and added Tang's Chinese name, "Тан Фэн" [13]. However, DW's Russian edition also used the same wording in 2025, with экс- ("former") added [14]. This phrase alone does not show a way of writing peculiar to state media.

Among Russian-language media published from outside the country (what Makeeva and Volkov called "independent" at the DW panel), no articles mainly about Tang or Taiwan's digital democracy were found in the searches made. At the DW panel, Makeeva named Meduza as the main example of such media [6]. There, Taiwan appears rather as a metaphor. According to a report in Новая газета Европа (Novaya Gazeta Europe), Garry Kasparov called on the opposition abroad to gather "вокруг виртуального Тайваня" (around a virtual Taiwan) [15].

Russia's systems of participation

Since 2014 the city of Moscow has run an electronic survey called "Активный гражданин" (Active Citizen) [16]. According to a 2018 investigative article by Ivan Golunov (Иван Голунов) published in Meduza, the system had drawn criticism for padded vote counts, strange framing of questions, and merely rubber-stamping decisions already made [3].

On the electronic petition site "Российская общественная инициатива" (Russian Public Initiative), a petition that gathers 100,000 signatures within a year is reviewed by a working group of government experts. According to Russian-language Wikipedia, by September 2017, 14 petitions had reached 100,000, and one had been implemented [17].

Remote electronic voting over the internet (ДЭГ) has also drawn much criticism. The criticism section of the Russian-language Wikipedia article lists suspicions of fraud in the 2021 parliamentary election and concerns that the secrecy of the ballot is not sufficiently protected. The political scientist Vladimir Gel'man called the system a "чёрный ящик" (black box) [4]. In a tally by the TV channel RTVI, in 15 single-member districts in Moscow in 2021, if electronic votes are excluded, candidates backed by the Navalny team's "Умное голосование" (Smart Voting) came first in 7 districts. In the results including electronic votes, every backed candidate lost [18].

Smart Voting was a strategy, run outside government, for consolidating opposition votes. Before the 2021 parliamentary election, Роскомнадзор (Roskomnadzor), the agency that oversees communications, put its site on the register of banned sites. After that, Google and Apple removed the app from their Russian stores, and Telegram also stopped its bot [19].

What is debated

No criticism of Plurality itself written in Russian has been found. Most of the criticism listed here is aimed at Russia's institutions, not at the book.
Are state "participation" and citizens' tools the same thing? In 2020 Теплица социальных технологий (Teplitsa of Social Technologies), an organization that has introduced civic technology, wrote that the period in which the most civic tech platforms and tools appeared in Russia was 2010–2013. It also presents a view that separates "civic tech", started by citizens, from "govtech", built by governments [20]. The criticism of Active Citizen and electronic voting above can also be read as showing that systems built by the state can work quite differently from the participation the book describes. → Civic tech · Digital democracy
Reservations about quadratic voting. Milanović wrote that there are difficulties, such as over how many years' worth of the same number of votes to hand out, and how to think about future elections not yet known. Milanović also said that the question of who gets to vote cannot be solved by weighted voting [9].
Buterin's proposals are not the book's claims. The 2026 post is Buterin's personal opinion. It also carries the reservation that, while the crypto world's goal is systems that "can't be evil", achieving it 100% in human society is unrealistic, and achieving 25% would already be a good result [5].

Where it fits in Plurality

What has reached Russian readers is not so much the book as a whole as individual tools such as quadratic voting, quadratic funding and Polis. They have mainly been passed on by Buterin and cryptocurrency media. The state of translations is summarized in Book editions and translations.

How Tang is portrayed connects with the articles on Audrey Tang and Taiwan's digital democracy. The difference between state-built participation systems and citizens' tools bears on the discussion of civic tech.

Articles on other countries and regions:

Sources

Check for a Russian translation (GitHub forks and the language registration on plurality.net) — https://github.com/alxkzmn/plurality-rus-translation ; https://github.com/pluralitybook/plurality.net ［CC0］
Russian version of the outline, "Плюральность" (2022, CC0) — https://github.com/johnhadaway/plurality.net/blob/main/src/site/versions/russian.md ［CC0］
Meduza, investigative article on «Активный гражданин» (2018-06-25, in Russian) — https://meduza.io/feature/2018/06/25/moskovskiy-servis-aktivnyy-grazhdanin-zapuskayut-na-vsyu-rossiyu-na-nem-zarabatyvayut-chinovniki
Wikipedia (Russian), "Электронное голосование в России" — https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Электронное_голосование_в_России
The Moscow Times, reprint of Buterin's post (2026-02-13, in Russian) — https://ru.themoscowtimes.com/2026/02/13/vitalik-buterin-esli-net-plana-kak-razrushit-armiyu-rf-do-kontsa-i-zaehat-v-moskvu-s-tankami-on-nerealistichnii-a187200
Transcript of the DW Global Media Forum panel (2022-06-21, CC0) — https://github.com/audreyt/transcript/blob/main/2022-06-21-DW-Global-Media-Forum.md ［CC0］
ForkLog, "Управление: не только голосование монетами" (2023-03-21, in Russian) — https://forklog.com/exclusive/upravlenie-ne-tolko-golosovanie-monetami
Incrypted, translation of an essay by Buterin (2022, in Russian) — https://incrypted.com/vitalik-buterin-o-ethereum/
Milanović, "Во весь голос" (IPG Journal, 2019-09-02, in Russian) — https://www.ipg-journal.io/ru/regiony/mir/vo-ves-golos-866/
swissinfo, "Чему Швейцария и Тайвань могут поучиться друг у друга?" (2019-12-16, in Russian) — https://www.swissinfo.ch/rus/%d0%b4%d0%b5%d0%bc%d0%be%d0%ba%d1%80%d0%b0%d1%82%d0%b8%d1%8f/%d1%8d%d0%bb%d0%b5%d0%ba%d1%82%d1%80%d0%be%d0%bd%d0%bd%d0%b0%d1%8f-%d0%b4%d0%b5%d0%bc%d0%be%d0%ba%d1%80%d0%b0%d1%82%d0%b8%d1%8f_%d1%87%d0%b5%d0%bc%d1%83-%d1%88%d0%b2%d0%b5%d0%b9%d1%86%d0%b0%d1%80%d0%b8%d1%8f-%d0%b8-%d1%82%d0%b0%d0%b9%d0%b2%d0%b0%d0%bd%d1%8c-%d0%bc%d0%be%d0%b3%d1%83%d1%82-%d0%bf%d0%be%d1%83%d1%87%d0%b8%d1%82%d1%8c%d1%81%d1%8f-%d0%b4%d1%80%d1%83%d0%b3-%d1%83-%d0%b4%d1%80%d1%83%d0%b3%d0%b0/45427898
Wikipedia (Russian), "ТАСС" — https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/ТАСС
TASS, article on OneWeb and Tang (2023-06-18, in Russian) — https://tass.ru/mezhdunarodnaya-panorama/18051991
TASS, article on Tang's visit to London (2023-06-18, in Russian) — https://tass.ru/mezhdunarodnaya-panorama/18053719
DW (Russian edition), article on the Right Livelihood Award (2025, in Russian) — https://www.dw.com/ru/nazvany-laureaty-alternativnoj-nobelevskoj-premii-2025-goda/a-74199164
Новая газета Европа, "Записки из виртуального Тайваня" (2024-03-05, in Russian) — https://novayagazeta.eu/articles/2024/03/05/zapiski-iz-virtualnogo-taivania
Wikipedia (Russian), "Активный гражданин" — https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Активный_гражданин
Wikipedia (Russian), "Российская общественная инициатива" — https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Российская_общественная_инициатива
RTVI, tally of the 2021 Moscow election (in Russian) — https://rtvi.com/stories/kak-deg-izmenilo-rezultaty-vyborov-v-moskve/
Wikipedia (Russian), "Умное голосование" — https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Умное_голосование
Теплица социальных технологий, history of civic tech (2020-02-07, in Russian) — https://te-st.org/2020/02/07/the-main-thing-about-civic-tech/

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