Georgy Khosroevich Shakhnazarov (; October 4, 1924 in Baku, Azerbaijan SSR, Transcaucasian SFSR, Soviet Union – May 15, 2001 in Tula, Russia) was a Soviet politician and political scientist. He was one of the half-dozen aides closest to Mikhail Gorbachev while he was Soviet leader and after his fall from power at the collapse of the Soviet Union. Shakhnazarov was an early advocate of reform and helped Gorbachev to shape his plans to open up the system to new ideas and freedoms, but, like his boss, he failed to articulate a clear vision of where he believed the country should go. After Gorbachev was ousted by Boris Yeltsin, Shakhnazarov became a key figure in the newly established Gorbachev Foundation. His loyalty to Gorbachev was unquestioned, and he was with him at many of the critical moments as Soviet leader. He was at Gorbachev's side during the strained meeting in East Berlin in October 1989 to help convince the East German Politbüro to reform. The two shared a celebratory private glass of champagne when Gorbachev was elected the first (and last) Soviet president in March 1990. Shakhnazarov was staying at a sanatorium close to the presidential dacha at Foros in the Crimea that fateful August 1991, when he helped Gorbachev in his plans for a new Union Treaty to define relations between the republics. Indeed, the two spoke by telephone about it on the afternoon of 18 August, the last call Gorbachev took before the coup plotters moved in and cut off his contact with the outside world. Shakhnazarov (the Russified form of Shakhnazaryan) was born into the then large Armenian community in the Azerbaijani capital, Baku. He fought with the Red Army against the Nazis in World War II in Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania. He graduated from the law faculty of Azerbaijan State University in 1949, and earned a doctorate in political science and philosophy at the Moscow Institute of Law in 1969. From 1952 to 1961 he was an editor at the publisher Politizdat, where he began writing books (one of his first was Burzhuaznoe gosudartsvo v epokhu imperializma (The Bourgeois State in an Age of Imperialism), 1955). In the 1960s and 1970s he spent two spells at the international Communist magazine Problems of Peace and Socialism, based in Prague, giving him a wider perspective on the world than many of his colleagues in the Party establishment. His political