If Putin visits the websites of the main sociological services — VTsIOM All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion × or FOM Public Opinion Foundation ×  — he will see there a simultaneously pleasant and surprising picture. The data on how many Russians approve of his activities looks almost like a straight line, steadily going up and hardly dropping below 60% . On several occasions, the president’s approval rating dropped to 57-58%. And after the war, it increased by 20%: from 64% to 82%, according to FOM data, and from 62% to 79%, according to VTsIOM data × .

In fact, over the past few years, Putin’s approval rating has been constantly fluctuating up and down. The full picture should look like this:

Who’s the Fairest of Them All?

Putin was worried about the approval ratings of Dmitri Medvedev and the governors — he did not want them to equal his level of support. Because of this, the Kremlin started giving opinion pollsters instructions about which data could be published and which could not.

In the early 2000s, Kremlin officials often asked each other the question: “How am I going to show these figures to Vladimir Vladimirovich?” , political strategist Gleb Pavlovsky, who worked with the presidential administration during Putin’s first two terms and under Medvedev, recalls × . The point was that when Putin came to power against a background of voter fatigue from the elderly Boris Yeltsin, he quickly became accustomed to huge numbers of popular support — in January 2000, 84% of the population approved of his performance , according to VTsIOM data available on the Levada Center website × . The young president quickly began to perceive any fluctuations in the approval ratings as something abnormal and an oversight by his staff. “He wanted to bathe in the people’s love,” says an employee of the presidential administration in the early 2000s. — Sociology was the mirror that said, ‘You are the fairest of them all.” However, from time to time the people’s love would drop, and looking in the mirror would become unpleasant.

Another mishap occurred in 2003. All year long, on the eve of the Duma elections, the state-run VTsIOM was publishing data which indicated that United Russia might lose to the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) . FOM polls also showed high support for the Communists, but still gave the victory to United Russia × . The polls infuriated Vladislav Surkov, deputy head of the Kremlin administration in charge of domestic policy in general, and elections in particular. At a regular meeting which Project’s interlocutors call “political planning,” where presidential administration officials and experts used to gather, Kremlin bosses wanted to hear explanations from VTsIOM. But Yuri Levada, the then head of the center, avoided visits to the Kremlin and only sent in his deputies infrequently , as told us by sociologist Sergei Belanovsky, who was present at one of the “planning sessions” × . Head of FOM Alexander Oslon had to answer for both himself and his colleagues — it turned out that the pollsters had invented the so-called correction coefficient. This is a well-known sociological tool — in the previous elections, the Communists got more than the polls showed, and Putin got less, and then experts began to lower the figures of government support in their forecasts. The Kremlin demanded that the amendment no longer be applied, and one of the officials present at the meeting said irritably about VTsIOM: “We need to deal with them” . Belanovsky recalls × .

The threat quickly materialized — Levada was summoned to the Kremlin and sacked . Levada’s associate Lev Gudkov, subsequently director of the Levada Center, recalls × , so he had to create an independent Levada Center, which would still face problems in the future (more details below). Valery Fedorov, an acquaintance of Alexei Chesnakov, the then deputy head of the Kremlin Domestic Policy Directorate both are graduates of the Philosophy Faculty of Moscow State University × , was appointed as the head of VTsIOM.

Fedorov never missed a meeting at the Kremlin. Sociologists were very important participants in “political planning” — they often even began with Oslon’s report on the weekly dynamics of the Kremlin’s approval ratings as told by Pavlovsky and confirmed by the former head of one of the departments of the internal political bloc of the Presidential Administration × . The President’s schedule — what events he should attend and what topics he should bring up — was also discussed there, bearing in mind the voters’ reactions to Putin’s previous statements. If something wasn’t right, they would change the plans. But it has become even easier to change the polling itself: since then, the researchers have become malleable and didn’t want to spoil the president’s mood.

In 2010, under Dmitry Medvedev, the “national leader” , during Putin’s premiership, his supporters began referring to him as such × discovered yet another reason to get upset. At the time, the ratings of the young president and the experienced prime minister suddenly equalized. The most annoying thing was that almost as many voters were ready to vote for Medvedev in the next election as for Putin — 21% and 24%, respectively . Medvedev’s approval rating was 76%, while Putin’s was 77% × . We only know these figures thanks to the Levada Center.

The pro-Kremlin pollsters simply concealed this data. FOM got exactly the same figures, but the Kremlin has forbidden them from being published Pavlovsky recalls × . VTsIOM, on the other hand, did not ask such a question at all — the possible answers included either Putin or Medvedev, but never both . From the beginning of Medvedev’s term until March 2011, Putin was not among the possible answers to the traditional question: “Who would you vote for if the elections were held next Sunday?” And in the fall of 2011, when it became known that Putin would run for president at the next election, Medvedev disappeared from the polls. VTsIOM asked the following question several times in 2011: “Let us suppose that Dmitri Medvedev will run for president in March 2012. <…> For which of these candidates would you most likely vote?” Putin was not among the options × . “[It was done] so as not to square them off against each other,” explains Igor Eidman, a former VTsIOM staffer . At that point, Eidman no longer worked at VTsIOM and knows this from the words of his former colleagues × .

The Kremlin was jealous not only of Medvedev’s approval rating, but even of that of the governors. “Some regions were told: ‘Why is your governor’s rating going up, while Putin’s isn’t?” — recalls a political technologist who worked on gubernatorial campaigns.

Since 2018, for the sake of the president’s peace of mind, VTsIOM stopped comparing him to other politicians altogether. They simply stopped asking people how they would vote in the next election. (* as recalled by a sociologist who worked at VTsIOM during those years; his words are confirmed by the data from VTsIOM’s database). But even the lack of competition wasn’t enough for Putin — pollsters began to employ instruments of manipulation in order to get the right answers.

A typical example is the VTsIOM poll before the 2019 Moscow City Duma elections, in which opposition candidates were not allowed to participate. Right in the text of the question, the pollsters reported that the election commission had discovered invalid signatures in support of Gennady and Dmitry Gudkov, Ilya Yashin, and Lyubov Sobol. And then they asked:

Some people think that in this situation, the electoral commission should act in accordance with the law and deny registration to candidates who have committed signature collection violations. Others think that despite the violations, the electoral commission should have registered all candidates. Which point of view do you agree with more?

The questions about participation in protest rallies were worded similarly — in them, people were also immediately hinted at the right answer:

On July 27, an unsanctioned protest rally was held in Moscow. Do you agree or disagree with the opinion that in such situations, the authorities should act in accordance with the law, even if harsh measures have to be applied?

Not surprisingly, by giving people a clue as to what complies with the law and what doesn’t, the pollsters got the results the Kremlin demanded: more than half of respondents agreed that opposition candidates should not be registered, while 61% of Muscovites supported the government’s harsh actions at the rallies.

Such polls have recently become the norm.

On the eve of the war, VTsIOM asked citizens if they supported the recognition of the independence of the LPR and DPR, once again with an interesting wording:

Please tell us, do you or do you not support the president’s decision to have Russia recognize the independence of the DPR and LPR?

That is, this question was not about the Donbass problem, but about approval of the president, explains Alexei Titkov, a lecturer at the Moscow Higher School of Social and Economic Sciences. Once again, the Kremlin got the result it wanted — 73% supported Putin.

The pollsters phrased the question about the Russians’ attitude toward the agreement with the LPR and DPR, which was the basis for the aggression against Ukraine, even more clumsily. VTsIOM asked this:

Yesterday the president and the heads of the DPR and LPR signed treaties on friendship, cooperation and mutual assistance. Do you or do you not support Vladimir Putin’s decision to sign these treaties?

78% of respondents were in favor of the “friendship”.

Secondly, the drop in Putin’s approval rating has also affected the options for answers — the pollsters have now practically stopped asking people open-ended questions, i.e. those where respondents can give their own answers as told by a regional pollster working with FOM, and a former employee of VTsIOM × . One of the FOM contractors provided The Project with a closed survey of Orel Oblast residents — there is not a single open-ended question there. this is a large “GeoRating” poll, conducted three times a year almost all over Russia at the request of the government, with 500 people surveyed in each of about 70 regions. Its results do not get published × . The answers given also lack variety — for example, when asked about the media outlets they read or watch, respondents were only offered a choice of local media loyal to the government, while independent media outlets were not on the list.

But the biased answer options are best seen in the FOM poll about the purpose of the “special operation” in Ukraine. Three out of four answers are for supporters of the war: “to ensure the security of Russia,” “to protect the residents of the DPR and LPR,” and “to remove Ukrainian nationalists from power.” There is only one option for opponents of the war, and it is not the most obvious: “to liquidate the statehood of Ukraine and annex it to Russia.” Young respondents aged 18-30 chose it one and a half times more often than all the others — but it does not usually make it into press releases or news reports . For example, this was not mentioned by Vedomosti, RIA-Novosti, Gazeta.ru, and other pro-government outlets × .

All of The Project’s interlocutors, including former employees of both centers, affirm that neither VTsIOM nor FOM “draw numbers” — all they have to do is ask the right questions to the right people. Then the answers will be “right” too, especially since citizens are becoming more and more afraid to talk to pollsters with each passing year.

Answers out of Fear and for Food

Russians and residents of the captured regions of Ukraine have become afraid of pollsters and often give “correct” answers out of fear

One can find many messages on social networks lately from users saying that they took part in opinion polls, but were afraid to answer honestly. “The atmosphere of fear” in the country is so great that it affects polling data and it is now difficult to take polling data seriously, argues a political technologist working with the presidential administration on condition of anonymity.

The questions are structured like this: first they ask about the approval of the authorities, then about support for the special operation. (Somewhere in between these questions was a very funny one about Mishustin and Shoigu, whether I approve of their activities. There was also a similar question about Putin.) The funniest one was: if they call a protest rally this weekend, will you take to the streets to support it? I asked them if they would send a paddy wagon to pick me up if I answered “yes”

This spring, VTsIOM conducted polls twice, in late April and late May, in towns and villages in the Donetsk region that had just been seized by Russia Mariupol, Volnovakha, the villages of Mangush and Volodarske, and the settlement of Bezimenne × , one of the organizers of these polls told The Project another pollster familiar with market participants confirms his identity. Moreover, this person’s cooperation with VTsIOM is confirmed by data from the Getcontact service. Another market participant knows that pollsters were looking for a contractor for such a project. A third one claims that the authorities consulted with him about the very possibility of conducting polls there × . People were asked how they felt about the “special operation,” about Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, about whether they wanted their city to become part of Russia or the DPR, to remain part of Ukraine or to become independent. The majority answered that they wanted to become part of Russia, according to The Project’s interlocutor.

It’s clear why this happened — in Volnovakha, Mangush, Volodarske and Bezimenne, pollsters worked in the temporary accommodation centers, says The Project’s interlocutor. According to him, in Mariupol, at the end of April, they only worked at a point of distribution of humanitarian aid from the United Russia party. It was not until May that people were polled on the streets, i.e. in places where they did not feel so dependent on the occupation authorities.

Even inside Russia, polls by VTsIOM and FOM show a high (65-76%) level of support for the invasion of Ukraine. But few admit it — most refuse to talk to pollsters. For example, Russian Field researchers, together with Maxim Kats, conducted a survey of attitudes toward the war — 29,500 people out of 31,000 abstained from answering Kats wrote about it on Twitter × . An employee of the regional contractor of FOM also spoke about the growing share of refusals: “Earlier about every third person on the standard interviewer’s itinerary sheet of 18 people agreed to talk, but after the start of the ‘special operation’ only every sixth person did. They say bluntly: ‘I don’t want to go to jail”. Sociologist Ekaterina Kurbangaleyeva makes a similar point: focus-group conversations are recorded on camera and this scares the respondents.

Answers without publication prospects

The Kremlin forbids sociologists to publish poll results that are bad for them, including those about Alexei Navalny. And the data from the disloyal Levada Center is simply forbidden from being cited in the media

In the spring of 2022, the results of a VTsIOM poll on how Russians use YouTube landed on Putin’s desk, a source close to the leadership of the presidential administration told The Project. There was a lot of talk in the Russian administration about whether to block the world’s largest video hosting site, and eventually the officials decided to see how citizens would react — they were asked if they used the service often, whether they thought an information war was waged through it, how they felt about the blocking of the Duma channel YouTube blocked some of the official channels of Russian government departments in early April × and what they thought about the potential blocking of the service itself according to two respondents to that poll × . The results turned out to be very complementary to YouTube; they were not published, but were sent to the country’s leadership, according to The Project’s source close to the presidential administration. They declined to disclose the data in more detail.

The FOM poll gives a rough idea of the answers: the company did not specifically ask about the service being blocked, which is probably why their data ended up in the public domain. According to the poll, more than half of Russian Internet users watch YouTube; a third of those users watch it every day. Families with children under the age of 10 were polled separately: half of them watch YouTube every day.

Most likely, the results of these polls influenced the future of the service two of The Project’s interlocutors heard about this — a sociologist who works with government agencies and a political technologist close to the AP ×  — the Kremlin is not currently considering blocking YouTube . At least two different sources close to the presidential administration say with certainty that the issue of blocking YouTube “isn’t on the table right now” × .

The YouTube story is more of a rule than an exception. If the results of a poll indicate growing discontent among Putin’s supporters, the authorities do not publish such data, but they can respond. For example, in the spring of 2017, VTsIOM conducted a survey about the renovation program in Moscow as told us by two former employees of VTsIOM × . The survey showed that renovation was perceived as a mistake of Putin, not of Mayor Sergei Sobyanin. And the authorities immediately decided to soften the rhetoric and not rush the renovation — Sobyanin then promised to “carefully consider all meaningful statements made at the protest rallies.”

Overall, at least a third of the poll results are not published, says Dmitri Rudenkin, a former VTsIOM employee. A former FOM employee put the figure at 50-70%. So it turns out that people don’t have the right to know their own opinion on most issues.

Polls about Alexei Navalny are frequently not published. VTsIOM asks about people’s attitudes toward him in almost every phone survey according to two of the Project’s interlocutors × , but the results are unknown to anyone In recent years, the VTsIOM and FOM websites have featured Navalny’s name only in responses to open-ended questions — that is, where he was mentioned by the respondents themselves × . At the height of last year’s protests following Navalny’s trial, FOM conducted a focus-group study of the values and political sympathies of 17-35 year-olds at the request of the authorities. The report on the results of this study, which ended up at the disposal of The Project, has never been published, and it is clear why. The study participants ranked the reset of Putin’s presidential terms and the arrest of Navalny as the worst events of recent years. And the main conclusion of the study probably did not please the Kremlin at all:

Among the respondents there are both those who sympathize with Putin and those who feel antipathy toward him, many have a neutral, indifferent attitude toward him. But almost no one would vote for him now.

From the FOM survey on the values and political sympathies of young people

At a time when the Kremlin could easily prohibit the publication of any materials by FOM and VTsIOM, only the Levada Center spoiled the picture. But the authorities have found a solution even in this situation: they have banned all controlled media outlets — which includes almost all media outlets remaining in Russia — from publishing news based on their polls. This happened two years ago claims Denis Volkov, head of the center. According to him, only old surveys can be cited, but even that is rarely done × .

Voting at First Sight

Pollsters were not just publishing the right questions — with their help the authorities were constructing an alternative reality in the country

In late June 2022, in the midst of another Russian offensive in Ukraine, the media began to spread a seemingly totally irrelevant article: “Museum and exhibition attendance in Russia has increased by 1.5 times over the past 30 years.” This survey that feels as if it were from another reality was conducted by VTsIOM.

Sociologists began to help the Kremlin create an alternative agenda long before this case — back in 2017, when anti-corruption protests were held in Russia after Navalny’s film “Don’t Call Him Dimon” which was released on March 2, 2017 and told about a large-scale corruption scheme organized by Medvedev × . At that time, the presidential administration wondered how to divert the attention of the population. The officials turned to pollsters for help: they asked them to help with some “good news”. The latter began to come up with polls that the media would use to write positive news according to a former FOM employee. The authorities also commissioned polls about the movie and the protests, says a former VTsIOM employee × like “Russians Believe in Love at First Sight.”

Sometimes, with the help of polls, the government tries to program public opinion. A few years ago the Kremlin decided to promote the New People party — back then, VTsIOM began to publish regular polls which implied that this then-unknown party would get into many regional parliaments, and would eventually make it into the Duma For example, a little more than a week before the 2020 regional elections, VTsIOM published an analytical survey of the chances of New People in the elections. It named the party one of the leaders in several regions. And before the 2021 Duma election, VTsIOM conducted a study commissioned by the party, forecasting that the party had the best chance of making it into the Duma from among the non-parliamentary parties × . This data was actively replicated by the pro-Kremlin media Channel One, TASS, Moskovsky Komsomolets, Life.ru, and others × , and New People made it into the Duma.

Expensive Respondents

Corruption is evident even in Russia’s opinion polls: the family of a Kremlin polling supervisor receives expensive orders from the Kremlin for public opinion surveys

VTsIOM and FOM are the Kremlin’s most famous, but not only assistants. In recent years, representatives of Insomar Institute for Social Marketing. Three people close to the presidential administration confirm its ties with the Kremlin × . have begun appearing at meetings in the presidential administration.

However, it does not stop at meetings: the company has received orders, for example, to conduct research and exit polls for the 2021 parliamentary elections this follows from the documents of the company and its affiliated legal entities that The Project has obtained. The Project’s sources confirm this as well × . At the request of the Kremlin, pollsters were investigating whether Chulpan Khamatova and Alexei Pivovarov, as more loyal candidates from the Kremlin’s point of view, could beat oppositionists Lyubov Sobol and Sergei Mitrokhin in electoral district 208 in the Central Administrative District of Moscow × . Another option was Liza Alert coordinator Oleg Leonov, who ended up running against Mitrokhin — he got into the Duma by joining the New People faction, for which Insomar also conducted polls.

In total according to the financial statements The Project has obtained × , only in 2021, Insomar has received about 580 million rubles from the authorities and structures associated with the Kremlin and state agencies. How was it possible that a little-known company began to receive contracts along with prominent competitors?

In 2012, Volgograd sociologist Yevgeny Mikhailenko, who had previously worked with United Russia and VTsIOM, joined the presidential administration. Soon after he joined the Kremlin’s domestic policy bloc, he became head of the very same department responsible for polling, which includes analyzing public opinion poll data and assigning tasks to pollsters . It has now become the Department for Interaction with Expert Organizations, subordinate to the Presidential Directorate for the Support of the State Council’s Activities. The Department is headed by Alexander Kharichev, a long-time associate of First Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration Sergei Kirienko × .

At almost the same time, his wife Anna two market participants and a source well acquainted with the situation at Insomar confirmed to The Project that she was Mikhailenko’s wife × became the owner and manager of Insomar . The company was founded in 2004 by sociologist Sergey Haikin, who had been working with the presidential administration back in the 2000s. According to The Project’s source familiar with the situation at Insomar, Yevgeny Mikhailenko had known Haikin for a long time and had been involved in the company since its founding. Insomar also received orders from the Kremlin during Haikin’s tenure, but with Mikhailenko’s arrival, their number began to grow noticeably × . Evidently, so that the situation would not look too provocative, in 2015 Anna transferred the company’s shares to her partners, whose connection with the Mikhailenko spouses is easily established . In 2015, Maria Zvyagina took control of Insomar, but Zvyagina and Mikhailenko had jointly established the Orthodox organization “Orthodox Parish of the Church of the Holy Martyrs Faith, Hope, Charity and Sophia” in Volgograd. Natalia Fadeeva became the director of Insomar after Anna Mikhailenko — she had taken over the management of the Volgograd marketing company OOO AMK from Evgeny Mikhailenko. This company still receives contracts from companies related to the Mikhailenko family × . Later, Mikhailenko and her husband created another structure, ANO Bolshaya Strana, which she transferred to her brother, Alexei Paramonov Anna’s maiden name is Paramonova, according to her Ok.ru page; her and Alexei’s patronymics also match; they lived at the same address in Volgograd, where they were both born. And the current head of ANO Bolshaya Strana is Olga Paramonova × , in 2016.

Insomar and Bolshaya Strana regularly receive orders for opinion polls and, accordingly, payments from so-called Kremlin “operators” — structures that distribute money among contractors of the presidential administration. One such operator is EISI Institute of Social Research × , whose board of trustees is headed by Boris Gryzlov, chairman of the Supreme Council of United Russia and Russia’s ambassador to Belarus, while its executive director is Anna Fedulkina, a long-time associate of Alexander Kharichev, Mikhailenko’s boss in the Kremlin. Another company that transfers money to legal entities associated with the official’s family is the PR agency Polylog, which until 2017 was headed by the same Fedulkina.