There will also be elections in the fall of 2015, and a lot of people have been asking whose campaign experience is worth studying. They are especially interested in candidates who achieved strong results with relatively modest funding (since, obviously, no one has any money).
In that regard, I highly recommend the excellent study by Vladislav Naganov and Tatyana Volkova: Ranking the Effectiveness of Moscow City Duma Election Campaigns, 2014.
The Moscow City Election Commission spent a long time playing games and withholding the final campaign finance reports, but eventually published them, and Vlad and Tatyana analyzed the data in terms of the money-to-votes ratio. Comparisons like this are made all over the world and they matter, but in Russia there is almost no such data.
What is especially important is that the study compares things that can actually be compared. It makes no sense to create one overall ranking and compare the “cost per vote” of a pro-government candidate, who gets everything for free, with that of an opposition candidate, who often cannot get many things even when paying for them.
That is why the study compares winners and losers, and also—very importantly—includes an analysis of those who finished in second and third place: both by total spending and by cost per vote.
Given that the Moscow City Duma elections were recent and received fairly extensive media coverage (so you can dig around and quickly find what this or that candidate did), these calculations are very useful. I recommend them to everyone involved in elections and/or planning to run.