Yuri Alexandrovich Levada (; 24 April 1930 in Vinnytsia – 16 November 2006 in Moscow) was a well known Russian sociologist, political scientist and the founder of the Levada Center. Scientific activity to 1988 In 1952 Levada graduated from the Philosophical faculty of the Moscow State University. He got a PhD in philosophy in 1966 with a dissertation on the sociological problems of religion. From 1956 to 1988 Levada worked at the Russian Academy of Sciences (Russian: АН СССР). He was the first Russian professor to ever lecture sociology and did so at the faculty of journalism of the Moscow State University. During the political thaw under Nikita 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 invasion of Czechoslovakia. He also criticized, that few actually read Pravda'''s long editorials, and Pravda quickly and bitterly denounced the sociologist. In 1969 Levada was deprived of his rank as a professor for ideological errors in his lectures. The “Institute of concrete social researches” (Russian: Институт конкретных социальных исследований), where Levada was responsible for the Theory and Methodology sector had to undergo a total political cleaning. In 1972 the institute was closed down during a Leonid Brezhnev-era purge of some 200 sociologists from research institutes and universities. Levada started a new job at the Central Economic Mathematical Institute (Russian: Центральный экономико-математический институт). He started a methodological seminar which united supporters of many different scientific areas and was for a long time considered a semi-legal institution. In 1988 the core of employees of his former sector at Russian Academy of Sciences and members of his seminar helped him to set up the Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VCIOM). In 2003 Levada together with all other employees left VCIOM due to internal problems and continued their work at the Levada Center. Levada was voted Person of the year in 2004 by the “Analitika” («Аналитика») on the website Rambler.ru. On 16 November 2006 Yuri Levada died and was buried in the Troyekurovskoye Cemetery. Work at VCIOM From 1988 to 1992 Levada was the head of department for theoretical researches at VCIOM, under the direction of Tatyana Zaslavskaya. In 1992 to 2003 he was the director of VCIOM. In 1994 he became the Chief Editor of the magazine «Social and economic changes: public opinion monitoring»