For 28 years, the Levada Center has remained the most important research institute in Russia. (c) Mikhail Metzel / AP / Press Association Images. All rights reserved.On 5 September, Russia’s ministry of justice added the Yuri Levada Analytical Center, commonly known as the Levada Center, to its register of NGOs that supposedly function as foreign agents. The authorities accuse the center of receiving foreign funding to carry out political activity.
Lev Gudkov, the centerƒ’s director, has said that the ministry has no legal basis for this decision, and the Russian Association for Market and Opinion Research (OIROM), whose members include the country’s major sociological research organisations, has given the center its support.
The Levada Center is not the first organisation of its kind to have been registered as a "foreign agent". St Petersburg’s Center for Independent Social Research (CISR) and the Social Politics and Gender Research Center in Saratov, which has been forced to close, were already on the list.
