Levada Center

Levada Center

Formation	2003 (1987)
Type	Research institute, independent nongovernmental organization
Purpose	opinion polls, social research, marketing research
Location	Moscow
Key people	Lev Gudkov, director Tatyana Zaslavskaya, honorary president Alexei Grazhdankin, Boris Dubin, Marina Krasilnikova, Alexey Levinson and Yuri Poletayev, Lyudmila Khakhulina
Staff	Approximately 60
Website	www.levada.ru

The Levada Center is a Russian independent, nongovernmental polling and sociological research organization. It is named after its founder, the first Russian professor of sociology Yuri Levada (1930–2006). The center traces back its history to 1987 when the All-Union Public Opinion Research Center (VTsIOM) was founded under the leadership of academician Tatyana Zaslavskaya. As one of Russia's largest research companies,^{[citation needed]} the Levada Center regularly conducts its own and commissioned polling and marketing research. In 2016, it was labelled a foreign agent under the 2012 Russian foreign agent law.^[1]