The story
The thought of establishing an independent sociological center first arose in the late 1980s and was the idea of Viktor Voronkov and Oleg Vite, who, at the time, were employees of the Leningrad division of the Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Sociology. Inspired by the rapid social and political changes taking place in the country, they gathered a group of enthusiasts and started conducting their own independent research projects. Edward Fomin, Elena Zdravomyslova, and Ingrid Oswald actively participated in the practical fulfillment of this idea. They all shared a desire to create a flexible, democratic research structure that would be capable of responding to the demands of a quickly changing Russian society and of promoting the integration of Russian sociologists into the international sociological community. The Center actually began working a few years before it was legally registered in 1991.
In 1994, the Center acquired a converted apartment office on Vasileostrovsky Island. CISR conducted various research projects, and became a visible actor in the Russian and international sociological communities. In 2000, CISR was able to acquire new office space on Ligovsky Prospect thanks to a grant from the Ford Foundation. The next year (2001), CISR received its first institutional grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
In June 2015 Russia's Ministry of Justice added the Centre to the so-called list of "foreign agent".
From Wikipedia’s article on Centre for Independent Social Research, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3