Respected Pollster Threatened by Russian Nonprofit Crackdown

The director of the Levada Center, Russia’s only independent polling agency, said it might be forced to shut down amid the Kremlin’s crackdown on nonprofit organizations, writes The New York Times.

Prosecutors in Moscow ruled last week that Levada’s work “influences public opinion” and thus constitutes political rather than research activity, and they ordered the center to register as a “foreign agent” under a law adopted last year for nongovernmental organizations that receive support from abroad. Levada head Lev D. Gudkov said fighting the designation, as some Russian nonprofits have pledged to do, would effectively put his group out of business.

The center pioneered U.S.-style polling in post-Soviet Russia, and its findings are often at odds with Kremlin claims about public opinion. It has received about $800,000 over three years from the MacArthur, Ford, and Open Society Institute foundations, which Mr. Gudkovs said amount to about 3 percent of its budget.