All-Russia Center for the Study of Public Opinion (VTsIOM)

Founding of VTsIOM

Yuri Levada

The founding and development of the agency was intertwined with the career of its founder, Yuri Levada-- the first professor to teach sociology at Moscow State University. During the political thaw initiated by 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. Yet, his first conflict with those in power came from a survey asserting that few actually read Pravda's notoriously longwinded editorials; and Pravda quickly and bitterly denounced the sociologist. In 1972, his institute was closed down during a Brezhnev-era purge of some 200 sociologists from research institutes and universities.

Levada was reinstated by reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev as glasnost was under way. He went on to establish the All-Union Center for the Study of Public Opinion (VTsIOM) in 1987, which was renamed All-Russia Center for the Study of Public Opinion after the end of Soviet Union in 1991.

In an interview Yuri Levada [1] (http://www.svoboda.org/programs/fr/2004/fr.011104.asp) refers to Tatyana Zaslavskaya (Татьяна Заславская) and Boris Grushin (Борис Грушин) as the founders of VCIOM in 1987. He states that he was invited by them to join VCIOM.

Breakup and founding of VTsIOM-A

VTsIOM became widely respected for its objectivity and professionalism among academics and journalists in both the Soviet Union and the West. In the 1990s, the agency's polls gained a reputation for being very reliable.¹

Although VTsIOM received no budget money from the Kremlin and funded itself with private-sector polling contracts from the breakdown of Soviet Union in 1992 to 2003, Levada had not addressed the fact that the polling agency remained a state-owned agency on paper.

This allowed the state to employ a legal technicality and appoint a new board of directors in September 2003, composed mainly of its officials, to oversee the work of VTsIOM. None of VTsIOM's sociologists were among these government appointments. Prior to that point, VCIOM had conducted over 1,000 polls [2] (http://www.ng.ru/politics/2003-08-06/1_choice.html).

Levada stated that the Kremlin move was aimed in part at silencing growing public opposition to the Chechen war in the election season. (In recent years, the Kremlin has employed similar legal maneuvers to take over the independent NTV, TV-6 and TVS networks.)

After VTsIOM's management was forcibly changed, Levada and some of his colleagues quit their jobs (and, moreover, the equipment and resources that they had used for 15 years) to start up a new private polling agency, which they named Analytical Service VTsIOM (or VTsIOM-A). VTsIOM-A was renamed Yuri Levada Analytical Center (or Levada-Center) in March 2004. There is conflicting data about response from other Russian sociologists to the breakup of VCIOM. Some sources [3] (http://magazines.russ.ru/nz/2003/5/levin.html) report that every sociologist left with Levada. Others claims they were silent, except for Grushin. [4] (http://www.mn.ru/issue.php?2003-32-15).

The Property Ministry, which was reorganizing VTsIOM on behalf of the government, welcomed the researchers' departure." Now they [VTsIOM-A] can really become independent, step into the market and live according to the laws of the market, which include paying taxes and competition," said a ministry spokesman.

The new director of VCIOM is Valeriy Fedorov (Валерий Федоров), then a political scientist in his late twenties with no experience in public opinion polls, formerly a director of Center of political trends(Центра политической конъюнктуры). Many sources refer to him as a member of the presidential administration [5] (http://weblite.imbg.ru/ideas/my/43.html), but this is not confirmed on his curriculum vitae [6] (http://www.rosbalt.ru/2003/09/13/118515.html). He has assembled a new VCIOM staff, most of whom are little-known.

Lilia Shevtsova, an analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center [7] (http://www.carnegie.ru/en/) (established by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace) who used VTsIOM statistics in her recent book Putin's Russia, said she was pleased Levada was trying to maintain the independence of his research.²

When asked about VCIOM management change during his visit to Columbia University in the United States in September 2003, Russian president Vladimir Putin was supportive of the change in management [8] (http://www.vesti7.ru/news?id=2963). Levada reportedly claimed that he disrupted at least three attempts to convince Putin that his approval rating is considerably lower than it actually was. [9] (http://magazines.russ.ru/nz/2003/5/levin.html).

Methodology

External links

• Levada-Center (http://www.levada.ru/) - in Russian, English version under construction
• VTsIOM (http://www.wciom.ru/) - in Russian, some English
• RussiaVotes.org (http://www.russiavotes.org/) - results of VTsIOM/Levada-Center surveys in English

Notes

¹ A free-access, English-language assessment of the accuracy of poll ratings published by VCIOM throughout the 1996 presidential and parliamentary election year is offered by a University of Indiana site at [10] (http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~dmiguse/Russian/polls.html).
² Oksana Yablokova, " Levada Leaves VTsIOM for VTsIOM-,'" The Moscow Times, September 10, 2003. This article is cached by a Yabloko website at [11] (http://www.eng.yabloko.ru/Publ/2003/PAPERS/9/030910_2_mt.html).