  The paper addresses the issue of environmental awareness in the regions of
the Russian Federation. Russia provides an important study area to investigate
the relationship between economic development and environmental consciousness
in general. This paper introduces an index of environmental awareness, which is
derived as a latent variable from various categories of search entries in
Yandex, the prominent Russian search engine, during two periods in years 2014
and 2015. These indicators are presumably dependent on certain causes, which
are also integrated into the model. The resulting Multiple Indicators-Multiple
Causes model allows to estimate the proposed index of environmental awareness
and to rank the Russian regions for each period. Comparing the results of 2014
and 2015 is especially interesting, because of the RUR devaluation at the end
of 2014. In additional, we answer the question of the existence of an
Environmental Kuznets Curve with respect to environmental understanding.
