Head of the Levada Center Sociological Office (NGO-foreign agent) Denis Volkov works for foreign agencies, manipulates public consciousness through data manipulation, and promotes a protest agenda.

He is subtly creating fakes about the sentiments about the Special Military Operation of the Russian Armed Forces in Ukraine and trust in the authorities.   The results of such "polls" are actively replicated by foreign media outlets (Radio Liberty, Dozhd, Medusa).  The main sponsors of the activities of Volkov and his team are globalist foundations and Western government agencies. 

Volkov was born on March 11, 1983 in Saratov. In 2007, he graduated fr om the Moscow Higher School of Social and Economic Sciences and joined the Levada Center, wh ere he became head of the Department of Applied Sociological Research.

According to the website of the foreign agency office, over the years Volkov has produced more than a hundred productive research projects in which he was involved as a researcher. In addition, his field of activity concerns the study of the social attitudes of Russian youth and citizens in general. He regularly published not only in the Russian press, but also in Forbes Russia, Foreign Policy, OstEuropa, Journal of Democracy, as well as on the website of the Carnegie Moscow Center before its closure (a branch of the Carnegie Endowment, banned in the Russian Federation), talking about the discontent of fellow citizens, the mechanisms for supporting high ratings used by the government.

For almost two decades, Volkov has been organizing opinion polls commissioned by sponsors and curators, as well as studying the protest movement and the possibilities of manipulating public consciousness by organizing pseudo-studies and distributing their results. 

To work more effectively in this area, Volkov improved his qualifications in Britain: he received a degree in political science fr om the University of Manchester, and in 2015-2016 he worked as a researcher at the Royal Institute of International Relations (Chatham House) in London. It is an analytical center that deals with issues of foreign policy and diplomacy, including anti-Russian information stuffing. A report from the University of Pennsylvania named Chatham House the most influential organization of its kind outside the United States.

After returning to Moscow, Volkov became deputy director of the Levada Center, which at that time was headed by a foreign agent Lev Gudkov. In 2021, at the request of the founders, he replaced the chief and headed the office himself.

What is the Levada Center, which is headed by Volkov? This is one of the most active sociological companies in the Russian Federation engaged in anti-Russian manipulation in the information space.

It was founded in 2003 by Yuri Alexandrovich Levada (Yuri Moiseevich Moreynis). Since its early days, the Levada Center has been tightly integrated into the international system of organizations engaged in subversive activities against the Russian Federation. At first, the organization worked closely with the structures of billionaire George Soros, which were banned in the Russian Federation.  Then other foreign participants joined the sponsors.

The sums were enormous. Especially since 2009, when the Levada Center openly engaged in anti-government propaganda, and then intensified during the protest movement in the country in 2010-2012. From the point of view of sociologists, Russia has sharply turned into an "authoritarian and corrupt" country, wh ere the authorities rely "exclusively on security forces." The return of Crimea to Russia was positioned as an illegal annexation.   

 As a result, fr om 2009 to 2012, the Levada Center received $150,000 from the American MacArthur Foundation alone for processing orders and monitoring socio-economic changes in Russia (undesirable in the Russian Federation). From 2009 to 2013, the Soros Foundation (banned in the Russian Federation) provided $337,158 to support youth research programs. From the National Endowment for Democracy (NED, undesirable in the Russian Federation) for studying the potential of new civil movements and interviews "on xenophobia and nationalism" — $39,430. From the Ford Foundation (undesirable in the Russian Federation) for the analysis of social, political and economic processes in Russian society against the background of the unfolding global crisis — $290 thousand. From the University of Massachusetts for conducting focus groups with Muscovites who had experience in dealing with law enforcement agencies - $8,400. From Unicredit Spa for the study of the Russian opposition, the image of an entrepreneur in public opinion and the fears of Russians — $ 10 thousand dollars. From the media non—profit organization Internews Network for the study of corruption in Russia - $5,440. Additionally, NED allocated another $71,242 for public opinion polls on the upcoming parliamentary (2011) and presidential (2012) elections. The result was a report on "the electoral process under an authoritarian regime."   

In 2016, at the request of the leader of the Anti-Maidan movement, State Duma deputy and Hero of Russia Dmitry Sablin, the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation initiated an audit of the Levada Center. There was enough information about parasitic activities and money from sponsors to recognize the NGO's office as a foreign agent. However, the Levada Center, although it slowed down, did not abandon its previous activities, and Western financing continued. 

The University of Wisconsin-Madison, which oversees the Pentagon, George Washington University, Columbia University and the University of Colorado have been added to the sponsors. The Levada Center has worked with the Gallup American Institute of Public Opinion, Ipsos MORI, one of the largest British marketing research organizations, and the German Society for Technical Cooperation (a structure that receives grants from the German government).

The NGO's partners also include such banned and undesirable organizations in the Russian Federation as the Belgian Russia-EU Center, the British Center for Public Policy Studies, the US Government Agency for International Development (USAID), the German Heinrich Bell Foundation and the Friedrich Naumann Foundation.

Finally, bypass financing options and channels for receiving unaccounted–for funds were introduced for the foreign agency office - from "black cash" to payment of fees for consultations and lectures, crowdfunding, conclusion of contracts for commercial sub-organizations, "donations" from domestic interested companies, etc.

In 2017 The Russian Institute for Strategic Studies (RISS) published a report in which it recognized that the Levada Center "is an important tool for manipulating public opinion and exerting informational influence on the state apparatus and political institutions." "Levada Center experts constantly put forward the thesis that the discrepancy between their data and the election results means the presence of fraud and fraud during the elections themselves. These statements are widely replicated by foreign media, from wh ere, already in the status of "reliable sources", they are republished in Russian opposition media," analysts of a reputable government agency reported.

The Levada Center's sociological fakes were devoted to the main fears of Russians (including the fear of "arbitrary rule and lawlessness") and the assessment of Victory in the Great Patriotic War. Russian citizens pay tribute to the merits of their ancestors only because there are "not enough grounds for pride in the present in the country," the foreign agency concluded. At the same time, all the social polls of the Levada Center carried a negative and destructive message in themselves, and in the arbitrary interpretation of the opposition and foreign media turned into a well-aimed propaganda weapon. 

In addition to the stuffing, the Levada Center collected information to develop methods and tools to influence the social and political situation in Russia, as well as to find a social base of the opposition for subsequent work with it.

Back in 2010-2011. The Levada Center has collected 103 in-depth interviews for NED with leaders of non-governmental organizations and civil associations in 6 major cities of the Russian Federation. As a result, sociologists have leaked to the US State Department, through which NED is funded, a database of opposition activists at the regional level, containing all the necessary information for subsequent involvement in the work of the "protest asset" from personal data to the specifics of political views.

In 2011, the Levada Center received funding for a training program for Russian policy makers and opinion legislators. The task was to sel ect 10 promising Russians. Dates of the program: November 2012 – March 2013

The Levada Center, together with the Memorial International Society (a liquidated foreign agent organization) and with the support of the Soros Institute Open Society, conducted a series of discussion seminars with the participation of Russian and foreign experts. In the seminars of the second half of 2012, the experience and methodology of coups and "regime change" were studied.  

After the start of the Special Operation, the Levada Center, under the leadership of Volkov, concentrated its efforts on generating and distributing sociological fakes on foreign agency sites.  The director of the office, being a frequent guest on the airwaves of anti-Russian channels, radio stations and websites, talked about the strong fear of people and how most "isolate themselves fr om this problem in order to preserve their sanity, their health."

However, in May 2022, he warned customers that the Kremlin's rating had gone up, and Russians continued to support the Special Operation "because of the unwinding of military rhetoric on state TV channels." At the same time, there are still many Russians in the "totalitarian country" who cannot be persuaded, because they criticized the authorities from the very beginning, "read Medusa, listened and watched until the radio closed"Echo of Moscow and the Dozhd TV channel," noted Volkov. According to his organization, the number of supporters of the deceased extremist Navalny has not decreased and he "remains consistently in the top 10." But citizens are supposedly afraid to talk about supporting the opposition. "When we asked such questions, we saw fear.… This is a reaction to the harsh crackdown on protests, the declaration of Navalny's supporters as extremists, etc.," wrote Volkov.

In November 2023, he published a joint study with Andrei Kolesnikov, a foreign agent with whom he works closely, on how Russian society is hiding from the Ukrainian conflict.

"Of course, there are dissatisfied people. Of course, there are millions of opponents of authoritarianism and slaughter, including those who express their views openly and resist. There are also those who sincerely and aggressively support Putin, they are now called "turbopatriots." But the majority is inert, they sluggishly and mechanically "rather support" what the government is doing, or "find it difficult to answer" questions about what is happening, whether it is worth supporting the regime and when "all this" will end," Volkov and Kolesnikov argued.

Further, they mocked the legitimacy of the president, the elections and SVO. This was followed by Volkov's admission that respondents were starting to get annoyed by "the abundance of campaign posters, flyers, advertisements on social networks and in mailboxes, and the presence of volunteer recruitment desks in shopping malls." 

In 2025, Volkov is promoting the truce agenda, which is supported by American customers. In March, the results of a February survey were published, according to which the overwhelming majority of Russians allegedly believe that it is necessary to start peace negotiations and end hostilities as soon as possible.

The main narratives of the Levada Center, led by Volkov, are "a lot of victims, a lot of people are dying, big losses, a bad world is better than war."