career in the Central Committee's International Department—which he joined in the early 1960s—was promoted by Fyodor Burlatsky, a member of the Socialist Countries Department who had the ear of Yuri Andropov. In March 1988, he was plucked from the department by Gorbachev to be a full-time adviser. At the same time he was building a parallel career as a political scientist and contributed to the professionalisation of the field in the later Soviet era. In 1975, he became president of the Soviet Association of Political Sciences (until 1991), and vice-president of the International Political Science Association (until 1988). In published works he recognised that Soviet society had different interest groups—an implicit rejection of a homogenised, communist society—and advocated a greater flow of information at a time of paranoid secrecy. He also publicly rejected the use of nuclear weapons to achieve political goals. A member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, he was elected on the Academy's list to the first semi-free Soviet parliament, the USSR Congress of People's Deputies, when it was inaugurated in 1989. He was a member of the commission to draw up a new Soviet constitution. Shakhnazarov wrote up his memoirs of the Gorbachev years as Tsena svobody: reformatsiia Gorbacheva glazami ego pomoshchnika (The Price of Freedom: Gorbachev's Reformation through the Eyes of His Aide, 1993). He was also the author of science fiction and plays. His son, Karen Shakhnazarov, born in 1952, is a noted film director. More radical than Gorbachev, Shakhnazarov contributed to the destruction of the system of which he had been a member, working tactically to abolish such anachronisms as the Communist Party monopoly on power. "As often happens in revolutionary situations," he later recalled, "there are things which seem banal today but which you couldn't even mention then." References Books online in English Socialism and Equality (1961) The Role of the Communist Party in Socialist Society (1974) Socialist Democracy: Aspects of Theory (1974) The Destiny of the World: The Socialist Shape of Things to Come (1979) Futurology Fiasco: A Critical Study of Non-Marxist Concepts of How Society Develops (1982) 1924 births 2001 deaths Corresponding Members of the USSR Academy of Sciences Soviet Armenians Burials in Troyekurovskoye Cemetery Politicians from Baku Baku State University alumni Communist Party of Armenia (Soviet Union) politicians Soviet military personnel of World War II Eleventh convocation members of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union Members of the