Obituary: Georgy Shakhnazarov (original) (raw)

Without a group of like-minded and intellectually rigorous fellow members of the central committee of the Soviet Communist party, Mikhail Gorbachev's attempts to reform the political and economic structures of his country might have ended sooner and have achieved less.

The political scientist Georgy Shakhnazarov, who has died aged 76, was senior aide to the general secretary and president from 1988 to 1991. His thinking was central to the Soviet Union's decision to let the Warsaw Pact countries choose their own paths to reform, and, at home, he shaped the policies of perestroika and glasnost. He remained close to Gorbachev, even after his country had collapsed and he was ousted, working for the Gorbachev Foundation until his death.

An Armenian, Shakhnazarov was born in Baku, where his family were members of the then large, and increasingly Russified, community in the Azerbaijani capital. His education was interrupted by the second world war, during which he fought with the Red Army in the Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic states.

After studying law at Azerbaijan State University, he took a doctorate in political science and philosophy at Moscow State University. From 1952 to 1961, he worked as an editor at the Polizdat publishing house.

The orthodoxy of his first writings led to a posting to Prague, where he worked on the Soviet international journal, Problems Of Peace And Socialism. Prague in the 1960s offered a wider perspective on international affairs than the Soviet Union, and exposed Shakhnazarov to the ideas of Czechoslovak socialists, which led to the 1968 Prague Spring.

Interviewed in the early 1990s, he stated his support for Czechoslovakia's unsuccessful attempt to break free from Moscow orthodoxy, and maintained that he had become an advocate of social democracy. However, while during the Brezhnev era Shakhnazarov and many others - Gorbachev included - came to question the rigid tenets of Marxism-Leninism, reform could not be openly discussed.

"Gorbachev, me, all of us were double-thinkers, we had to balance truth and propaganda in our minds all the time," he explained in one interview. "It is not something I'm particularly proud of, but that was the way we lived. It was the choice between dissidence and surrender."

Shakhnazarov, who had joined the Community party central committee in the early 1960s, bided his time. In books and articles, he cautiously suggested reforms, in particular allowing the Soviet public better access to information, and that it be recognised that a variety of interest groups existed within Soviet society.

Shakhnazarov worked in the central committee's department for relations with other Communist states, where some of the reformist ideas of the Gorbachev era were first formulated while Yuri Andropov was general secretary (1982-84).

After Gorbachev's appointment as general secretary in 1985, Shakhnazarov became one of a loose grouping of informal advisers to the new leader. In 1988, he joined Gorbachev's staff fulltime, working on relations with eastern Europe and on reform of the political system. His work contributed significantly to the 19th party congress in 1988, which paved the way for the transfer of power from the party to state institutions. This was the turning point in Gorbachev's attempts at reform; ending the Communist party's monopoly on power led, the following year, to the founding of the Congress of People's Deputies, of which Shakhnazarov was a member, but solidified resistance from hardliners.

Even in the teeth of this pressure - and of the Soviet leader's increasing reliance on his more conservative advisers - Shakhnazarov remained wedded to the belief that reform was the only way forward. By 1990, Gorbachev, now Soviet president - a move that Shakhnazarov believed would bolster his popularity - was under attack for his failure to ameliorate the economic situation.

In the summer of 1991, Shakhnazarov was holidaying near the Gorbachev family in the Crimea, and consulting with his boss by telephone about the new union treaty due to be signed by the Soviet states. In his memoirs, Gorbachev recalls that the last conversation he had before his telephone lines were cut off, by the August coup plotters, was with Shakhnazarov. After the failure of the coup, he flew back to Moscow with the Gorbachevs, and continued to advise the president throughout his final, powerless months as Soviet leader.

Once his political career had ended, Shakhnazarov returned to academic work. A sharp critic of Boris Yeltsin's Russia, he also wrote on international issues; one of his last published articles was an analysis of Yeltsin's successor, Vladimir Putin. He also published an untranslated memoir, The Price Of Freedom: Gorbachev's Reformation Through The Eyes Of His Aide (1993). A member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, he continued to be respected by younger Russian political scientists.

Shakhnazarov may seem to have lacked a decisive plan for effecting the transformation of the Soviet Union, but he vigorously defended Gorbachev's attempts. Perhaps better than anyone else, he knew that reforming the ossified system could only be done piecemeal, and his own experience had shown him that there were many obstacles that had to be overcome.

He is survived by his wife and his son, Karen, a film-maker and head of the Mosfilm studio.