Yuri Levada

Yuri Alexandrovich Levada (Russian: Ю́рий Алекса́ндрович Лева́да; 24 April 1930 in Vinnytsia – 16 November 2006 in Moscow) was a well known Russian sociologist, political scientist and the founder of the Levada Center.

In 1952 Levada graduated from the Philosophical faculty of the Moscow State University.

He got a PhD in Philosophy in 1966 with a dissertation on the sociological problems of religion.

From 1956 to 1988 Levada worked at the Russian Academy of Sciences (Russian: АН СССР). He was the first Russian professor to ever lecture sociology and did so at the faculty of journalism of the Moscow State University.

During the political thaw under Nikita Khrushchev, Levada was allowed to carry out limited surveys of public opinion. In one lecture, Levada had asserted that tanks could not change ideologies, a reference to the Soviet Union's 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. He also criticized, that few actually read Pravda's long editorials, and Pravda quickly and bitterly denounced the sociologist.

In 1969 Levada was deprived of his rank as a professor for «ideological errors in his lectures». The “Institute of concrete social researches” (Russian: Институт конкретных социальных исследований), where Levada was responsible for the Theory and Methodology sector had to undergo a total political cleaning. In 1972 the institute was closed down during a Leonid Brezhnev-era purge of some 200 sociologists from research institutes and universities.

Levada started a new job at the Central Economic Mathematical Institute (Russian: Центральный экономико-математический институт). He started a methodological seminar which united supporters of many different scientific areas and was for a long time considered a semi-legal institution. In 1988 the core of employees of his former sector at Russian Academy of Sciences and members of his seminar helped him to set up the Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VCIOM).

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