- Yuri Levada
Yuri Alexandrovich Levada ( _ru. Ю́рий Алекса́ндрович Лева́да;
24 April 1930 in Vinnitsa –16 November 2006 inMoscow ) was a well knownRussia nsociologist andpolitologist .Levada was the first professor to teach
sociology atMoscow State University . During the political thaw initiated byNikita 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 . 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 dissolution of theSoviet Union in 1991.External links
* [http://www.levada.ru/eng/ Levada-Center]
* [http://www.aei.org/publications/filter.all,pubID.25352/pub_detail.asp The Man Who Knew Russia Too Much] , "American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research ", 26 December 2006
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