[citation needed] In August 2003 the Ministry for Property Relations attempted to take control of the center by placing government officials on the VTsIOM board of directors.
[citation needed] 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.
[citation needed] During the political thaw initiated by Nikita Khrushchev, Levada was allowed to carry out limited surveys of public opinion.
[citation needed] In an interview, Yuri Levada[4] referred to Tatyana Zaslavskaya and Boris Grushin as the founders of VTsIOM in 1987.
[citation needed] VTsIOM became widely respected for its objectivity and professionalism among academics and journalists in both the Soviet Union and the West.
[citation needed] 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.
[5] Levada stated that the Kremlin move was aimed in part at silencing growing public opposition to the Chechen war in the election season.
[12] After the Levada Center on 1 September 2016 published the results of a poll that had found a significant decline in support for the ruling United Russia party, the Russian Justice declared that the pollster was "performing the functions of a foreign agent".
[17] "This manifests the increase in internal repressions carried out by the country's leadership," the center's director, Lev Gudkov, had told TV Rain, the New York Times reported, "If they won't cancel this decision, it will mean that the Levada Center will have to stop working, because you cannot conduct polls with such a stigma put on you.
[citation needed] The center carries out public opinion and research polls in fields such as sociology, economics, psychology and marketing.
With approximately 50 people in the Moscow office, 80 fieldwork supervisors in regional branches and about 3000 trained interviewers, it is one of the largest full-service research agencies in Russia today.
[citation needed] The key personnel are the founders of the company who started their research programs at VTsIOM and continue in the Levada Center.
The center publishes the Journal of Public Opinion (from 1993 to 2003, the editorial staff of The Messenger created and published the journal Monitoring of Public Opinion: The Economic and Social Change - named after one of the major research programs, developed under the supervision of the academician Tatyana Zaslavskaya).
[23] In collaboration with the Levada Center, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty weekly broadcasts the show Public Opinion (Общественное мнение: граждане России у микрофона Радио Свобода).
Completed studies include:[citation needed] Most important current studies:[citation needed] In 2015, the director of the Levada Center himself stated in 2015 that drawing conclusions from Russian poll results or comparing them to polls in democratic states was irrelevant, as there is no real political competition in Russia, where, unlike in democratic states, Russian voters are not offered any credible alternatives and public opinion is primarily formed by state-controlled media, which promotes those in power and discredits alternative candidates.
[12] In 2022 an LSE blog said "The most reputable public opinion data available in Russia are from the Levada Center, a non-governmental research organisation conducting regular surveys since 1988.