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Announcement

From the Director of the Yuri Levada Analytical Center

Starting from the evening of September 5th through September 7th, the Levada Center received hundreds of phone calls and letters from journalists and scholars who are concerned about its fate and the situation that is emerging around our organization, as well as those who are eager to express their support and solidarity with us. As we are unable to respond to all those inquiries, we have found it necessary to make the following statement.

From August 12th-31st, the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation conducted an unscheduled audit of the activities of the Levada Center for the period of the two and a half years since the last audit in February 2014. Based on its results, the Ministry, without waiting to receive our objections in accordance with the stipulations of the audit procedures, announced on September 5th that the Levada Center had been entered on the register of organizations serving as foreign agents. As a result, the slanderous campaign, which has been launched against our organization, received formal and legal justification. The audit was initiated and conducted after several appeals to the Ministry of Justice by a Federation Council member D.V. Sablin, one of the leaders of “Anti-Maidan”. Mr. Sablin has been accused, on multiple occasions, of corruption, illicit transaction, plagiarism, and other misdeeds. For all his odiousness, this person is just a mouthpiece for the interests of groups that monopolized the theme of patriotism and threats to national security and who demand, under this slogan, the redistribution of government resources and legal immunity.

The situation that has been created as a result greatly complicates the activities of our organization. I am not speaking about the unavoidable limitations of our ability to finance our work. But in and of itself, the designation of “foreign agent,” which, in our country, is understood without exception as a synonym for “spy” and “saboteur,” makes conducting of representative and other types of sociological polling impossible. Fear, remaining from Soviet times, paralyzes people, particularly those who work in government structures: education, medicine, management, etc. From the regions it has been reported to us that employees of state institutions are forbidden from having contact with representatives of organizations with the designation “foreign agent.”

In the coming days, following consultations with lawyers, we intend to contest in court the outcome of the audit report that we received.

Numerous media outlets are now claiming that the Ministry of Justice “revealed the foreign sources of funding” for the Levada Center, in spite of the fact that there has never been an attempt to conceal those sources, considering that financial accounts have been regularly provided to the appropriate controlling bodies and the tax bureau. This fact is recorded in the very audit report: “…it was found that documents, which contain accounts of their activities, of the personnel makeup of the leadership, as well as documents about the expenditure of finances and the use of other assets including those received from international and foreign organizations..., the Organization provides this specified information to the authorized body yearly…. In the course of the audit of the Organization, facts suggesting extremist activities were not discovered.” (p. 5)

This is not the first hostile campaign aimed at if not destroying, then discrediting our independent research team, which since the autumn of 1988 has been conducting sociological research in our country. Objective, verified data on the state of society and public opinion in Russia, especially during crises and critical situations, evoke a sharp response from biased politicians, bureaucrats, and ideologues when the diagnosis and picture of society provided by sociologists are not consistent with their expectations and political interests. This is as true of pro-government politicians and functionaries as it is for opposition members, but, in contrast to the latter, authorities possess powerful tools for the discreditation and legal destruction of those who run afoul of them.

Attempts to subjugate the All-Union Public Opinion Research Center, headed by Yuri Levada, as early as in 2002-2003 led to the creation of the independent noncommercial organization “ Yuri Levada Analytical Center”.

The Russian Institute for Strategic Studies (RISS) openly pursued a program of suppression of any independent non-governmental and academic organization in its publications. For example, the report “Methods and Technology of Foreign and Russian Research Centers, Research Structures, and Institutions of Higher Learning Receiving Funding from Foreign Sources” (February 2014) lists a variety of governmental and non-governmental institutions “receiving financing from foreign sources and conducting ideological or propagandistic work in Russia.” This list included the Levada Center, along with the Russian Political Science Association, the Center for Policy Studies in Russia, the Russian International Studies Association, the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Russian Economic School, and other organizations.

Only at first glance do these assertions appear to be the delirium of the social fringes or the paranoia of retired secret police. In reality, behind this new wave of spy-mania, reproducing the worst examples of totalitarian practices, are the cold and cynical interests of power, ownership, and ideological control.

The very presumption that interactions between Russian academics and representatives of civil society and their counterparts in foreign countries are anti-patriotic and hostile is unacceptable.

Upon establishing the fact that financing for several projects came from foreign sources, the comprehensive audits carried out in both 2013 and 2014 on the same basis and using the same criteria, formulated in similar documents, ordered the Center to cease accepting foreign grants.

The Center was forced to reject grants coming from foreign foundations for carrying out sociological research, but it was allowed to participate in joint projects with foreign organizations (universities, foundations, etc.) and fulfill orders for publicly significant cultural, marketing, and other types of surveys of the Russian population that were placed via commercial agreement. The amendments to the law on non-profit organizations and political activity adopted in 2016, as with other recent laws and bylaws, open the window for administrative abuse. As the meaning of “political activity” and “foreign financing” is purposefully not defined by the law, it is possible to use repressive measures against organizations considered undesirable by influential political groups. As a result, foreign financing began to be perceived as acceptance of any funds coming from abroad, including the financing of public activities (academic, educational, and philanthropic) by Russian foundations if they are located abroad. Funds flowing in from abroad for purely commercial purposes are now considered illegal.

The consequences of these practices exercised by the Ministry of Justice and other agencies include the abrupt limitations and subsequent termination of contact between Russian academics and world science, and the cessation of Russia’s much needed process of acquiring global experience, techniques, methodologies, conceptions, and unwritten norms and rules of academic work. One must not think that repression of this type threatens only Sociology (as the least profitable sphere in Social Science and Humanities research). Once finished with Sociology, they will move on to History, Economics, Genetics, Physics and other sciences, as it was during the Stalin years. The Levada Center was included in the register of foreign agents under the number 141. Tomorrow the number of organization-agents working under foreign influence will reach higher into the hundreds or thousands. The consequences of this offensive will be felt by the public for the next 2-3 generations.

For our country, which for decades has been cut off from the development of modern sociological knowledge, and which is in a situation of deep intellectual provincialism, this points to further scientific degradation. A lack of understanding of this situation threatens us not only with isolationism and the chronic decline of human and social capital in our country, but its transformation into a reservation of a poor and aggressive population, soothing itself with illusions of national superiority and exceptionalism. As one highly respected individual from abroad wrote me yesterday, “the future of a country that does not want to know about itself is very bleak.” Such a policy of discreditation and destruction of the best in Russia’s civil society not only shames the country, but more importantly, leads to the suppression of the sources of its development and to stagnation. This inevitably turns the country into moral, intellectual and social morass, in which the state and society disintegrates.

We are proud of the opportunity to work with foreign partners; this is not a reason to discredit us as foreign agents. On the contrary, it is evidence of the professionalism and high quality of our research, the objectivity and reliability of the informational product produced, and the depth of interpretation of empirical data. This is what distinguishes the work of the Levada Center’s specialists from other institutes which conduct public opinion surveys.

The audit document is presented on our organization’s site along with my notes and commentaries on its individual points.

September 7, 2016
Director of the Levada Center, Professor L. D. Gudkov, Ph.D.

Verantwortlich: Dr. Manfred Sapper, Osteuropa, Schaperstr. 30, 10719 Berlin, Tel.: 030-30104581 osteuropa@dgo-online.org