13 Facts About Yuri Levada

Yuri Alexandrovich Levada was a well known Russian sociologist, political scientist and the founder of the Levada Center.

In 1952 Levada graduated from the Philosophical faculty of the Moscow State University.

Yuri Levada got a PhD in philosophy in 1966 with a dissertation on the sociological problems of religion.

From 1956 to 1988 Yuri Levada worked at the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Yuri Levada was the first Russian professor to ever lecture sociology and did so at the faculty of journalism of the Moscow State University.

In one lecture, Yuri Levada had asserted that tanks could not change ideologies, a reference to the Soviet Union's 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia.

Yuri Levada criticized, that few actually read Pravda's long editorials, and Pravda quickly and bitterly denounced the sociologist.

In 1969 Yuri Levada was deprived of his rank as a professor for ideological errors in his lectures.

Yuri Levada started a new job at the Central Economic Mathematical Institute.

Yuri Levada started a methodological seminar which united supporters of many different scientific areas and was for a long time considered a semi-legal institution.

On 16 November 2006 Yuri Levada died and was buried in the Troyekurovskoye Cemetery.

From 1988 to 1992 Yuri Levada was the head of department for theoretical researches at VCIOM, under the direction of Tatyana Zaslavskaya.

The Yuri Levada-centre continues the research programs that were launched by its collective between 1990 and 2000.