ABSTRACT
The pandemic-related restrictions on visiting theaters, museums, libraries, etc., as well as on organization of cultural events, had provided a boost to online forms of culture. The paper considers digitalization of culture and analyzes and assesses the development of “smart culture” within the framework of smart cities. First we aggregate the statistical data on attendance and digitalization of libraries and museums per the 8 Federal Okrugs of Russia in the Pre-COVID period of 2014–2019. We forecast that the growth of offline attendance during the timeframe of the National Project “Culture” will amount to 29%, which is considerably higher than the 15% required by the respective goal of the Project. Our results demonstrate uneven pace of digitalization for different types of cultural organizations and different regions of Russia. For instance, 50% of theaters in Moscow had websites by 2006, whereas the same threshold for the rest of Russia was only achieved around 2012. We expect that aiding people’s involvement with the culture-related ICT can provide social, economic and technical effects. At the same time, our findings might be useful for policy-makers engaged in e-culture and e-government development. © 2022, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.