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“Foreign agents”

UPD: Same list in English (thanks to Anna Sevortian for pointing this out).

Article20.org has the most reliable list (in Russian) of NGOs already subject to accusations of being “foreign agents.” The list includes 51 organizations so far and is grouped in three categories:

  1. those already being fined for refusing to register as “foreign agents”;
  2. those officially asked to register as “foreign agents”;
  3. those “warned” that they need to register as “foreign agents” if they receive foreign funding in the future or plan to engage in “political activities.”

While the work of several of the organizations in each category is highly relevant to social science research (Golos‘s election monitoring programs are a case in point), several of the institutions listed are specifically devoted to the social sciences:

  1. The Panorama Center in Moscow, which has been at the forefront of documenting the details of Russian politics for a quarter of a century
  2. The Center for Social Policy and Gender Studies in Saratov, publisher of the internationally respected Journal of Social Policy Studies and a host of monographs and edited volumes in sociology and social policy studies
  3. The Grany Center in Perm, which produces highly valuable studies of the third sector in Russia
  4. The International Memorial Society in Moscow, primarily a research institution specializing in the history of Stalinist repression, but also in human rights abuses and other aspects of contemporary Russian society (their human rights division has received a separate demand to register as a foreign agent)
  5. Transparency International, a well-known corruption watchdog
  6. The Levada Center (see previous post)
  7. and, somewhat bizarrely, the All-Russian Center for Public Opinion Research, often considered Levada’s “evil twin”

If all or many of these organizations were to close as a result of the libellous accusations, most of our sources of first-hand social scientific knowledge about Russia would vanish.

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