1992 have been stored in “Archivist Database”. VTsIOM is the member of international professional networks including InterSearch and the Eurasian Monitor. It is guided by the European Society for Opinion and Market Research ESOMAR standards and norms. There are more than 70 specialists employed in the company headquarters in Moscow (with expertise in sociology, marketing, political science, finance, psychology, and statistics), as well as dozens in its offices around the country. The head of the Center is Valery Fedorov. History Foundation (1987) The Decree to launch VTsIOM (All-Union in those times) was adopted at the July meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1987. The founders were VCSPS (All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions) and USSR State Committee of Labour. The first director was Tatyana Zaslavskaya (academician). Zaslavskaya tells that the Institute of Demoscopy (Federal Republic of Germany) headed by Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann was taken as a model when establishing the Center. Grushin made many efforts in 1987-1988 to set up a network of sociological centers in the Republics of the USSR and regions of Russia. That made possible to conduct the first mass surveys on a representative samples among adults in November 1988; a year later these surveys became systematical. In 1988 Yury Levada together with his students (Lev Gudkov, Boris Dubin, Alexey Levinson and others) went to work in VTsIOM (first as the head of the Theoretical Research Department and later – since 1992 as the head of the company). In an interview Yuri Levada talks about the first years of VTsIOM, refers to Tatyana Zaslavskaya (Татьяна Заславская) and Boris Grushin (Борис Грушин) as the founders of VTsIOM in 1987 and states that he was invited by them to join VTsIOM. Growth, 1989–2003 VTsIOM became widely respected for its objectivity and professionalism among academics and journalists in both the Soviet Union and the West. In the 1990s, the agency's polls gained a reputation for being very reliable. During this period VTsIOM had conducted over 1,000 polls. Being the first sociological institution in the USSR (and Russia), VTsIOM served as the cradle for numerous marketing and sociological centers of the country. In August 1989 Boris Grushin left VTsIOM to establish his own organization studying the public opinion "Vox Populi - Glas Naroda" (People’s Voice). In 1992 the Public Opinion Foundation (FOM) that was originally established as a Division of the Center for raising