Personality in the public field

In 2003, Yuri Levada, together with his team of 82 people, was expelled from the All -Russian Center for Public Opinion (VTsIOM). 81 employee left with him: Yuri Alexandrovich did not urge anyone to go with him, it was just so natural to leave with the guru.

The Levada Center says, the reason for the dispersal of the most authoritative sociological team - and in fact, just the main sociological school of modern Russia - the fundamental honesty of research was. And not in the sense that, they say, Levada, being the “court sociologist of Yeltsin”, denigrated Russian reality and the bright image of the new first person. On the contrary, his studies coldly recorded the objective reality given to us in sensations and public opinion: the rating of Vladimir Putin is not just a "Teflon" - it is growing. This, apparently, prevented the increase in the well -being of some people who have stabbed resources to overwhelming work to increase the allegedly fallen rating. Other evil languages ​​are correctly claimed: every political decision is most often worth a bare financial interest ...

“Levada Center”, founded by a man-bronde and named after a man-brand is not the richest institution. But the Levada team has always been faithful to Yuri Alexandrovich, and not only in the last three and a half years, but also when during the period of Soviet political "frosts", in 1972, one of the nests of free sixties was dispersed - the institution of specific social research.

Until the very appearance of Levada and his team in VTsIA in 1988, where Yuri Alexandrovich went to Tatyana Zaslavskaya and Boris Grushin, disgraced sociologists not only did not interrupt “dangerous ties” with each other, but also managed to work. The closest employee of Levada, Alexei Levinson, who worked side by side with the master since the mid-1960s, called Yuri Alexandrovich a fearless man in a conversation with me: "I have never seen him be afraid of anything." And to be afraid in our Soviet and Russian political circumstances there has always been something.

Levada graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy in 1952, shortly before the death of Stalin. He turned out to be a contemporary of brilliant and eminent Soviet philosophers. However, philosophy invariably remained under the serious supervision of ideological organs, because it itself was part of ideology. Nevertheless, within the Marxist environment, Levada reached amazing degrees of freedom - even when he wrote a candidate dissertation about the forms of folk democracy in China or doctoral about the social nature of religion.

Yuri Aleksandrovich was a very simple person in communication, which seemed completely not proportionate to his real status. Although, most likely, one followed from another - he never needed to live on the principle of "seeming, not to be." He is the main sociologist of the country, he is the main sociologist - he does not need the host of secretaries, jokes, and flatterers.

"He had the ability to separate the important from the unimportant, good from evil in situations when I did not have a clear opinion or decision on this score. And he had," says Alexei Levinson. Levada never attended status or social events. But exactly when they took Mikhail Khodorkovsky, he immediately responded to the proposal to attend one of the events of Yukos. Because it was no longer a participation in secular life, not a political gesture, but a manifestation of internal dignity and honor.

The authority of Yuri Levada was indisputable not only for his own, but also for his opponents or direct ill -wishers. So respect people who cannot be bought. He honestly measured public opinion, analyzed it and informed the world about the state of the brain and emotions of the nation. The nation did not know or was not allowed to know that she had moral authority in the person of Yuri Alexandrovich Levada. But he only honestly and professionally did his job. No more. But no less.