Living in a society that was deliberately atomised, repressed and politically impotent, Yuri Levada and his colleagues were astonished by the response that their pioneering public opinion survey evoked from the supposedly passive Soviet population. His dense, full-page questionnaire, boldly entitled What do you think? appeared in the highbrow Literaturnaya Gazeta in February 1989. It was the first, faltering attempt to see what the public thought and wanted and would have been a suspicious concept just a few years earlier before Mikhail Gorbachev started his political liberalisation in 1987.

Expecting just 3,000 of the paper’s six million readers to have the nerve, the attention and the time to complete the survey, Levada and his colleagues watched with growing disbelief as 200,000 responses came in. The pent-up longing of the Soviet Union’s disparate populations to have their say was unstoppable.

He told the US journalist Hedrick Smith the following year. “For the first time we saw that our people are not only ready to answer a bold question but they actively want to speak out. The main result of perestroika is the disappearance of mass fear.”

Crammed into a makeshift office in a converted double-room of a rundown hotel on the edge of Moscow, Levada and his enthusiastic team had to store the bags of responses in the bath until Levada could find more suitable premises.

He took his 3,000 sample and began to analyse the answers, acutely aware that the survey was skewed by the overwhelmingly intellectual readership of the paper, who mainly blamed the Communist Party for the country’s woes. A follow-up poll that gave more weight to the working class found the loss of “strict order” more worrying. The Kremlin was concerned by the result of the polls, but by now reform was unstoppable.

Yuri Aleksandrovich Levada was born in the Ukrainian town of Vinnitsa in 1930 to a Russian father and a Polish Ukrainian mother, both journalists. Growing up speaking Polish at home, Levada followed particularly closely the upheavals in Poland in 1956 and, from the late 1970s, the growing Solidarity movement.

In 1947 Levada went to the prestigious Moscow State University to study philosophy, graduating in 1952. Sociology, to which Levada was most attracted, was not on offer. After graduating he briefly turned to Chinese studies, but this became impossible with the break in relations between the Soviet Union and China. He completed his doctorate in 1966, with a dissertation on the sensitive topic of the sociological problems of religion.

The Soviet authorities had always regarded sociology with suspicion, condemning it as a “bourgeois pseudo-science”. In 1966 Levada became the first in the Soviet Union to teach the subject, at Moscow State University’s journalism faculty and at a social research institute. He was a popular teacher, undogmatic, approachable and attentive to his students. Moreover, although a Communist Party member, his teaching eschewed the straitjacket of Marxist-Leninist ideology. In 1969 the university even published Levada’s introductory lectures on sociology in a duplicated version.

But by now, harsher winds were blowing. The thaw initiated by Nikita Khrushchev was long gone and Leonid Brezhnev was imposing ever-tighter controls, echoing at home the Soviet crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968. Increasingly under suspicion, Levada’s typically incautious remark in a lecture that “you cannot solve ideological issues with tanks”, which he repeated in his book, was the spark that saw his career go up in smoke.

Levada was denounced in Pravda, at meetings of the Academy of Sciences and even in the Communist Party Central Committee. He was promptly sacked, as were some 200 other sociologists over the next few years. The long years of the 1970s and early 1980s saw Levada trying as best he could to continue his work in obscure corners of Moscow’s academic world, out of the limelight and hoping for better days.

Although initially highly sceptical about Gorbachev, when glasnost finally arrived Levada was ready. In 1987 he founded VTsIOM, the AllSoviet Centre for Public Opinion Studies, and by hard work and careful nurturing of younger colleagues, turned it into the country’s most respected polling agency. Although funding for the state-owned agency was cut off as Russia became independent in 1991, the quality of the agency’s work and the new realities of post-Soviet Russia attracted clients such as political parties, companies and foreign organisations.

The halcyon days continued through the presidency of Boris Yeltsin, whose ramshackle administration left plenty of room for debate in society. But Vladimir Putin, who came to power intent on restoring statism as the new ideology, spurned public opinion, especially when it disagreed with his policies. With the Kremlin’s strategy of buying off the opposition, crushing dissenters and marginalising anyone who continued to speak up in a flattened political landscape, Levada’s polls provided an awkward reminder of realities that Putin could not stomach, such as widespread popular opposition to the wars in Chechnya. The Kremlin preferred spin and polls that it manipulated.

In a cunning move typical of current Kremlin tactics, the government ministry that had suddenly discovered it still owned VTsIOM turned it into a joint-stock company in September 2003 and appointed a new board of directors, who happened to be Kremlin loyalists. The Government claimed it wanted to make the agency’s finances more transparent, but Levada and his colleagues knew the truth. He told journalists he had spent months going from official to official. “I’d ask, ‘What problems do you have with VTsIOM?’ ‘No problems’. ‘What problems do you have with me?’ ‘No problems.’ And a bit later, in a confiding whisper, with shaky voices, they’d say, ‘We’ve been ordered to cut off your head’. ”

Levada left the centre with almost all his 105 colleagues, establishing an independent rival that was named the Levada Centre in March 2004.

While the government-loyal VTsIOM could rely on friendly political parties and local government entities for contracts, the Levada Centre had to rely on the skill and accuracy of its polls. With the large and jovial Levada still at the helm into his seventies, keeping a close eye on everything it did, the agency’s pollsters knew they had someone they could rely on.

Levada died of an apparent heart attack at his desk in the agency.

Yuri Levada, sociologist, was born on April 24, 1930. He died on November 16, 2006, aged 76.