"Levada Center" - foreign agents or independent analysts? What is the levada center and how does it howl against Russia

Having a wide, but very ambiguous reputation, the Levada Center sociological office, as they say in the media, is "finally recognized" foreign agent.

Why finally? Because de facto everything has been clear with Levada for a long time, and the legal status is only a confirmation to everyone known information, which allows dealing at the level of legislation with "sociologists" in accordance with their activities. It also leaves no room for ambiguity.

Today, September 5, an official announcement appeared on the website of the Ministry of Justice that the Ministry has entered the autonomous non-profit organization "Yuri Levada Analytical Center" into the register of foreign agents. On July 11, the Anti-Maidan movement addressed the head of the Ministry of Justice, Alexander Konovalov, with a request to recognize Levada as a foreign agent.

The reason for the appeal was the fact that, according to the information available to the activists, Levada hid its foreign funding, while since 2012 it has received more than 120 thousand dollars from the United States.

Source of funding - the University of Wisconsin, "Levada Center" money for some sociological research. Also, according to anti-Maidan activists, the specialists of the center indirectly work for the Pentagon.

“Activists of the movement found out that, despite the announcement that they were suspending their receipt of funding from abroad, the Levada Center receives money from the University of Wisconsin (USA). Moreover, in fact, the US Department of Defense is the end customer of the public opinion research services provided by the center. Therefore, we believe that the Levada Center should be returned to the register of foreign agents. Any activity on the territory of Russia with foreign funding should be marked,” said Nikolai Starikov, leader of the Anti-Maidan.

And today, finally, the Ministry of Justice made a decision on the application of the activists of the movement - not in favor of Levada. Of course, in the sociological center itself they deny everything, call information about foreign funding slander and deny it in every possible way.

"It's a lie clean water, juggling. We are dealing with research, with the University of Wisconsin. This is a study of the problem of housing, family history. We have nothing to do with the US Department of Defense. And where Wisconsin takes the money is their problem, how they are financed, ”said Lev Gudkov, director of Levada.

Actually, it can be noted here that, as such, Gudkov does not deny the receipt of money from the American military department. Just says they didn't get them directly and their research isn't directly related to military sphere. Despite the fact that information war is also in the sphere of attention of the Pentagon, and on these fronts Levada has done a lot - although without directly mentioning guns and tanks.

Among the latest "information achievements" can be named, for example, for the upcoming Duma elections. The technique is traditional - "forming" questions, that is, those that lead the respondent to a specific answer that the questioner needs. This is how Levada receives shocking data that everything is bad in Russia, and then liberal media and bloggers happily take it away.

At the same time, the information about foreign funding discovered by Anti-Maidan is far from the only one. For example, data on the cooperation of Levada with the Soros Foundation. Need to think, known facts- this is only a part of the iceberg, and "Levada" sits tightly and thoroughly on foreign grants. So dense that in connection with the assigned status of a "foreign agent" Lev Gudkov has already announced the possible closure of the center.

“This is a very bad thing for us, if we are really recognized and this decision is not canceled, this means the curtailment and termination of the activities of the Levada Center. Because it is simply impossible to conduct public opinion polls with such a stigma,” Gudkov said.

Although, it is worth repeating, everyone who is interested has known for a long time about what Levada is, and for those who do not know, nothing is likely to change for those now. What problems will arise with the status of a “foreign agent” is the unadvertised receipt of foreign funding and positioning itself as an “independent” social service.

You can conduct opinion polls perfectly, but passing them off as objective will become much more difficult. This means that it will be impossible to fulfill orders from abroad, and financial flows will become scarce.

Indeed, all this poses a considerable threat to curtail the activities of the Levada Center. But if they were really independent from foreign influence (let's be honest at least with ourselves) researchers - this would not have happened.

Not too long ago, the BBC reported that the Israeli parliament passed a "foreign agent law" today. The majority of Knesset members voted to ensure that NGOs that are funded from abroad must provide information about the sources and purposes of such funding.

Moreover, the Israeli Ministry of Justice has issued a decree requiring employees of foreign-funded NGOs to wear special “foreign agent” badges.

As you can see, Levada employees are not in danger of such a "democratic" innovation.

The Prosecutor General's Office conducted an audit of one of the most authoritative sociological services in the country - the autonomous non-profit organization Yuri Levada Analytical Center. According to Yuri Chaika's department, from December 26, 2012 to March 24, 2013, 3.9 million rubles were transferred to the accounts of the Levada Center from abroad. This was told to Izvestia by a source in the Prosecutor General's Office.

The think tank received money from the American Open Society Institute, as well as from organizations in Italy, the UK, Poland, and Korea.

Already after the start of the inspection, which was conducted by the Prosecutor General's Office, the Levada Center conducted a series of polls with results that were unpleasant for the authorities. In particular, data were made public that more than half of Russians agree with the assessment " United Russia” as “a party of crooks and thieves” and call Dmitry Medvedev’s cabinet of ministers “ineffective”.

The leaders of the Levada Center were not available for comment on the day the material was prepared.

The leadership of United Russia believes that the April polls of the center were conducted with the intent to make the inspection of the Prosecutor General's Office look like revenge on the part of the authorities.

I would emphasize the reverse causal relationship here, ”State Duma Vice Speaker Sergei Zheleznyak told Izvestia. - The Levada Center tried to make its reports, which were of a vivid oppositional nature, as public as possible in order to find a false justification for the claims of government agencies.

General manager Council for National Strategy Valery Khomyakov, on the contrary, believes that it was the aforementioned polls that led to the recognition of the Levada Center as a foreign agent.

If they had conducted other polls and found out, for example, that opposition leader Alexei Navalny is little known and not respected in Russia, then perhaps there would not have been such a statement,” Khomyakov added.

Alexei Mukhin, general director of the Center for Political Information, claims that he has heard before that the sociological center is financed from abroad.

The activity of the Levada Center raises suspicions. There are questions about the viability of the center, - says Mukhin.

Last April, the Levada Center also conducted surveys on the attitude of Russians towards political prisoners, the Bolotnaya case, and Kirovles. According to the results, a third of the respondents called for an end to the persecution of political opponents of the authorities, primarily the ex-head of the Yukos oil company Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the blogger Navalny.

The concept of a “foreign agent” arose in July 2012, when a draft law on NGOs was submitted to the State Duma by the United Russia faction, providing that all politically active NGOs funded from abroad must register with the Ministry of Justice in a separate register, where they will be given the status of "acting as a foreign agent".

After the entry into force of the normative act, the Golos association, the Memorial human rights center, the Agora association from Kazan and the Nizhny Novgorod Committee against Torture were recognized as foreign agents.

The reason for including the Levada Center in the register of foreign agents was the words of its director about “mafia power” in Russia, criticism of the annexation of Crimea and citation of sociologists’ research in an article by Boris Nemtsov’s daughter

RBC got acquainted with the act of checking the Yuri Levada Analytical Center, as a result of which the sociological service was included in the register of foreign agents. The check was carried out from August 12 to 30, the reason was the request of the leader of the Anti-Maidan movement, Senator Dmitry Sablin, the press service of the Ministry of Justice responded to RBC's request. ​

Unreliable statements

Levada Center, being financed by foreign organizations, participates in political activity in Russia in the interests of these organizations, according to the inspection report of the Ministry of Justice. The center does this, according to the department, “by preparing and distributing, including using modern information technologies opinions on decisions made by state bodies and their policies, as well as the formation of socio-political views and beliefs, through social research, public opinion polls and the publication of their results.

As examples of the participation of the Levada Center in politics, the Ministry of Justice cites eight speeches by the director of the center Lev Gudkov and the head of the sociocultural research department of the center Alexei Levinson with links to them. In October 2014, at the IV session of the Congress of Intelligentsia, Gudkov presented a report “The paradox of the success of immoral government: violence and voluntary irresponsibility”, where, as the Ministry of Justice points out, he spreads the opinion about “ the current system authorities as mafia and corrupt."

“Power is always described, in all cases when we ask to name the typical features of our deputy, politician, representative of power, the first positions are occupied by answers: impudent, dishonest, inefficient, incompetent, corrupt, putting themselves above the law, above the authorities, immoral, stupid and etc. A long list of unsympathetic definitions is given. Such characteristics are given by 45% of respondents and below, ”the Ministry of Justice quotes from Gudkov’s speech. “Also, the director of the organization, L. Gudkov, expresses an opinion about the presence of authoritarianism in the system of the current government,” the report says.

The Ministry of Justice was not satisfied with Gudkov’s opinion, expressed during his lecture in July 2016, about the political structure of Russia “as a closed authoritarian system, where power relies on law enforcement agencies, special services, oligarchs, government officials, bureaucracy and represents their interests.”

Officials also noted Gudkov's remarks about annexing Crimea in an interview with Radio Liberty in March 2014. The act contains the following quote: “The whole situation with Crimea can also be viewed as a reaction of the authorities to the weakening of mass support for the regime and the growth of social discontent. This is very important point. The feeling that everything political system in Russia is as corrupt as the Yanukovych regime, has not gone away. I think that after some time, when the frenzy and the effect of propaganda will weaken (this cannot go on for too long, there will be the opposite effect), people will feel, firstly, backfire annexation of Crimea, and on the other hand, they will begin to think about why Russia found itself in political isolation, why economic situation the country began to deteriorate sharply.

Aleksei Levinson, according to the Ministry of Justice, in an interview dated June 2016, “expressed an opinion on the adoption government agency decisions”: “I think that if there are outbreaks of popular discontent, then only in places where there is a concentration of problems or unexpected action on the part of the authorities. A famous example is Pikalevo [a city in Leningrad region, where locals went to rallies against the closure of enterprises]. Our authorities sometimes do stupid things, this can provoke a reaction.”

bad deeds

The Ministry of Justice in its act also listed the materials of the Levada Center, which it considered to be political activities in the interests of other states. Among them are the brochure "Democracy in Russia: Attitudes of the Population", the project "Monitoring Social and Economic Changes".

An aggravating circumstance for sociologists was that their materials were quoted by the media. “In the course of the audit, it was found that the results of the research conducted by the organization are applied by means mass media both in Russia and abroad. So, for example, InoPressa, a daily digest of the foreign press about events in Russia and in the world, regularly uses research data from the organization.<...>In addition to research carried out in various fields public life, the organization publishes articles and analytical materials on internal and foreign policy Russian Federation", - writes the Ministry of Justice. An example is a translation of an article in the international online newspaper Christian Science Monitor dated February 2016, which refers to the possible involvement Russian authorities to a campaign on social media and on the streets against US President Barack Obama. The department officials also cite the translation of a column by the daughter of the slain politician Boris Nemtsov, Zhanna, in the Russian English-language newspaper The Moscow Times titled “Reverse Movement: The Moral Decay of Russia,” published in December 2015.

The Levada Center received most of its foreign funding from the United States, including from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the supervising institution for which is the US Department of Defense, the audit report says. The center also collaborated with George Washington University, Columbia University, and the University of Colorado, according to data published on the Justice Department website. In addition, the Levada Center worked with the largest American public opinion institute Gallup, one of the largest British marketing research organizations Ipsos MORI, the German Society for Technical Cooperation (Deutsche Gesellschaft Fuer Technische Zusammenarbeit GMBH), cooperating with the German government, etc. All this cooperation recognized as foreign funding.

Inappropriate for elections

In 2013, after the adoption of laws on NPO agents, the center was already checked several times by the prosecutor's office, then sociologists avoided the status of a foreign agent. The Levada Center is not the first NGO to be included in the register for the statements of the leadership. In 2015, the inclusion in the register of foreign agents of the Dynasty and Liberal Mission funds, financed by well-known entrepreneur Dmitry Zimin, caused a great resonance. Then the reason for the Ministry of Justice to recognize the funds as political about modern politics.

NPO agents are required to indicate their status in all publications in the media and on the Internet. They may not "carry out activities that promote or hinder the nomination of candidates,<...>election of candidates<...>, as well as in other forms to participate in election campaigns, referendum campaigns”, in the law “On Basic Guarantees of Electoral Rights”. The law does not specify whether pre-election polls are subject to this restriction. The Levada Center cannot refuse all foreign contracts, Gudkov said on Tuesday, and the continuation of work on the publication of political ratings is still in doubt.

The government ratings published by the Levada Center are traditionally lower than those of the other two largest pollsters, FOM and VTsIOM. In early September, the Levada Center published a survey, according to the results of which the rating of United Russia fell noticeably - from 39 to 31% of respondents (poll of 1,600 people in 48 regions on August 26-29, 2016). According to VTsIOM, 41% of respondents are ready to vote for United Russia (1,600 people in 130 settlements, was held on August 28), the FOM had an electoral rating of the party at 45% (poll of 3,000 people, August 28).

The inclusion of the Levada Center in the register of agents is connected with the upcoming fourth term of Vladimir Putin, political analyst Alexei Makarkin believes. “The publication of pre-election ratings could be the last straw, but the real reasons are much deeper. There is a desire in the context of the upcoming presidential elections strengthen control and remove from the field sociologists who ask the population uncomfortable questions. This is due to the fact that the situation after the elections will be very difficult: retirement age, large-scale cost reduction, etc. - and all this in a difficult geopolitical situation", - says Makarkin.

Russian research organization "Levada Center". Such an unenviable status was assigned to her after an unscheduled August inspection conducted by the Department of the Ministry of Justice in Moscow. The reason for it was the request of the leader of the Anti-Maidan movement, Senator Dmitry Sablin.

What was the reason for this decision, and is it fair?

As the letter of the law says

According to federal law“On Non-Commercial Organizations”, NPOs that receive funding from abroad and are engaged in political activities are considered foreign agents.

“The reason for the inclusion of the Levada Center in the register of foreign agents was the words of its director about the “mafia power” in Russia, criticism of the annexation of Crimea and citation of sociologists’ research in an article by Boris Nemtsov’s daughter.”

Deputy Executive Director of the Golos Association Grigory Melkonyants that the reason for the new status of the organization was the publication of independent news:

“Obviously, these events are connected with the upcoming elections, moreover: the latest figures published by the center recorded a decrease in the popularity of United Russia. The current law, quite loyal in "peaceful" time, establishes the most rigid framework for the participation of "agents" in election campaigns, while at the same time leaving the list of forms of such participation open."

Grigory Yudin, Professor of the Moscow high school social and economic sciences, the opinion that the whole thing is in the weak influence of the Kremlin on published research:

“You need to understand how Levada differs from FOM or VTsIOM: unlike the above companies, the Kremlin does not give them orders, and therefore cannot so easily order which questions to ask and which results to publish.”

The Levada Center, despite open statements about refusing foreign funding, apparently still receives foreign grants. Think tank continues commissioned research, according to U.S. government procurement website foreign organizations.

At the end of May 2013, employees of the Levada analytical center announced that they were refusing foreign grants and suspending work on projects ordered by foreign institutions. A month earlier, the organization had received a warning from the prosecutor's office that it could be considered a foreign agent for carrying out foreign-funded political activities.

"Levada Center" then decided to switch to "public funding", which was reported on the official website of the organization. Employees announced a fundraiser in the amount of 670 thousand rubles for representative research projects in Moscow with the help of a private "Yandex Wallet".

In an interview with Vladimir Pozner on Channel One on December 14, 2015, Levada director Lev Gudkov answered a question about research funding.

V.P.: That is, you do not depend on the authorities, or on a private person, or even on those who order research for you and therefore pay?

L. G.: Exactly. Yes. Independence is expensive, and we earn our own money for our research.

On July 20, 2012, the Federal Law "On Foreign Agents" came into force in Russia, according to which political non-profit organizations financed from abroad must independently register with the Ministry of Justice as foreign agents. It was this law that caused the checks at Levada in 2013, and because of it, the center refused foreign funding - analysts did not want to become "foreign agents".

However, according to the government website on US government spending, the Levada Center continues to conduct research commissioned by foreign organizations. After the Foreign Agents Act came into force, the Levada Center received three research grants from US government agencies for a total of more than $121,000. Moreover, the center received the last funds from the United States a month before the aforementioned interview of Lev Gudkov with Vladimir Pozner was broadcast, namely November 2, 2015 - this date is indicated on the US public procurement website.

The latest study was commissioned by the United States Department of Defense. It took place in two stages: the first part was made in 2014, and the second, additional, in 2015, as mentioned in the description of the last purchase. The main grants were given to the University of Wisconsin, and the so-called sub-grants went to the Levada Center.

An amount of $8,400 was allocated for four additional focus groups - two each in Moscow and Yaroslavl. In each group, according to the condition, there should be 8-10 participants aged from 18 to 49 years, it is noted in the text accompanying the grant. It is difficult to single out any one research topic, there are a lot of positions indicated in the description. But there is no doubt that most of the issues are political.

Topics to be covered in the focus groups include: how participants perceive their housing situation and other aspects of their socioeconomic status, their relationship to housing issues, major social and political attitudes, their perceptions of the United States, military conflict in Ukraine and other major international issues, their assessment of recent government policy and the state of affairs in the country, the main changes in the economic conditions of the respondents over the past one or two years and other topics, the text accompanying the grant says.

The total amount of the contract for two years is $115,800. The study itself, according to the plan, was carried out from October 1 to December 31, 2015.

It should be noted that previous grants to the Levada Center were issued for holding similar focus groups. And the funds for the 2013 study were transferred almost two months after the statement of the center's employees about the refusal of foreign funding - on July 22, 2013.

The director of the Levada Center, Lev Gudkov, in a conversation with Life, disowned the availability of grants, saying that his employees only spend international studies with various institutions.

We do not have funding in the sense of grants - something that is the subject of crime and the basis for declaring a foreign agent. In this sense, we have neither grants, nor donations, nor any such reasons for accusations, - says the head of Levada. - But we certainly have international projects, we participate in joint projects, including those with foreign universities, we carry out some commercial orders.

These were, apparently, some old grants. Perhaps this is some kind of commissioned research. Or maybe there it is given to some university. And some joint international projects are already proceeding in this way, - said Lev Gudkov. - It's hard for me to say now, I just don't know what it's about. But we don't have direct grants, direct foreign projects.

Member Public Chamber Sergei Markov noted that he had always considered the Levada Center a foreign agent, primarily from the point of view of analysts.

We saw that they gave an interpretation in the data, which is almost always in strict accordance with the course of the US administration. How the United States said its position, exactly how it corresponded to all their interpretations, he believes. - The last example is their study, which showed sharp drop rating of "United Russia" after the primaries (results published on June 6. - Approx. Life). That is, the Levada Center tried to show that the preliminary voting procedure was carried out so badly that because of this, the rating of United Russia fell by almost 10%. But all other sociological centers did not record anything of the kind. And it seems to me that this is politically engaged, on order, and the goal is just to undermine the evolution of the United Russia in favor of greater openness. She them (States. - Approx. Life) very disadvantageous, because it strengthens the ruling party.

Markov added that "Levada" is "an extremely politicized center", which " extremely important for the organization of microrevolutions" because it can provide falsified sociological data.

If there is information that the Levada Center may be receiving money from US state and quasi-state structures, then, without a doubt, this should be the subject of an investigation in order for the Levada Center to be registered as a foreign agent, - the expert thinks. - First of all, the Ministry of Justice should check, and the Prosecutor General's Office - if the Ministry of Justice turns to them.