Professor of Politics at Oxford University and Chairman of the Political Studies Section of the British Academy

 

I was very distressed to learn of the sudden death of Georgiy Shakhnazarov with whom I spoke for the last time at Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev's seventieth birthday celebration this March. Like everyone gathered at your meeting, I had hoped to see him again soon. This is not to be, and on behalf of the Political Studies Section of the British Academy and of other British scholars who knew Georgiy Khosroevich either directly or from his work, I wish to extend my sincere sympathy on their bereavement to his family and to his many friends. Though I believe I am speaking also for others in Britain, my message is primarily a personal one. I had enormous respect and affection for Georgiy and I appreciated the fact that he always greeted me not only as a politolog sharing some of his intellectual interests but as a friend. He will be sadly missed not only in Russia but also in the international scholarly community by all who appreciate the remarkably varied and important roles he played in both political and scholarly life.

Those of us who had the doubtful privilege of reading Soviet political literature long before perestroika were well aware that, although Georgiy Shakhnazarov occupied an important position in the Socialist Countries department of the Central Committee, his writings were far removed from those of a stereotypical party apparatchik. Indeed, he was one of the people who raised the awareness of some of us to the fact that not only was the Communist Party of the Soviet Union not nearly as monolithically united as it pretended to be, but that even within the Central Committee building there were very different personality types and a surprisingly wide range of political outlooks. Shakhnazarov's writings, even in the Brezhnev era, were well worth reading, for more often than not they contained something new - at a time when the limits of the possible were, of course, much narrower than they became after 1985. Thus, for example, in his 1972 book, Sotsialisticheskaya demokratiya, he was already advocating a freer flow of information to Soviet citizens and acknowledging the existence of different interests within Soviet society.

Georgiy Shakhnazarov was also a leading figure in the pre-history of today's Russian Political Science Association. As the President for many years of the Soviet Association of Political Sciences, he did much to promote a more objective study of politics even in times when these aims could only be partially fulfilled. Through his contacts with the International Political Science Association, he helped to sow the seeds of the much wider co-operation between political scientists from Russia and Western countries which we see today. He told me many years ago how difficult it had been for him to persuade the Soviet authorities that the triennial conference of the International Political Science Association should be held in Moscow. It was a minor triumph for Shakhnazarov when this conference (which I attended) was, indeed, held in MGU in 1979. But Shakh told me (at a time when he was still working in the Central Committee) that a typical reaction in the party hierarchy was that expressed to him by a senior official: 'Politolog znachit sovetolog, znachit antisovetchik!'

I believe that Georgiy Khosroevich made his most historic political contribution during the perestroika years. As an adviser of Gorbachev both on reform of the political system and on Eastern Europe, he played a very significant part in institutionalizing political pluralism in Soviet (and hence in Russian) politics and in fully supporting the policy of no more military interventions to prevent the countries of Central and Eastern Europe choosing for themselves how they wished their societies to be governed. As a Russified Armenian who had fought through the Second World War and had believed that the whole of the Soviet Union he was fighting to liberate was his homeland, he, of course, enormously regretted the disintegration of the Union. He was one of those who worked especially hard in the last years of the Soviet era to turn the former pseudo-federation into a genuine federation or looser confederation.

Even while he was serving in the Central Committee apparatus, and much more explicitly later, Georgiy Shakhnazarov was essentially a social democrat. To the end of his life he was striving to find ways to combine social justice with political freedom and to promote a more peaceful world. As a politician and political analyst, he was enlightened, shrewd, and far-sighted. As a person he was highly cultured, kindly, and courteous. It was a great privilege to have known him and I would like to join you in honouring his memory.

 

20^th May, 2001 Archie Brown

 

GEORGY SHAKHNAZAROV

Though less well-known to the Western public than some of his political contemporaries in Russia, Georgy Shakhnazarov, who died suddenly at the age of seventy-seven on 15^th May shortly after giving a speech in the city of Tula, was one of the most important reformers of the late Soviet period. He was a key adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev during the perestroika years and he continued to work with him in the Gorbachev Foundation in Moscow until his death. Shakhnazarov was also, over many years, one of Russia's most astute political analysts and, in the unreformed Soviet Union, a vital link between Russian social scientists and their Western counterparts.

Georgy Khosroevich Shakhnazarov was born in the Azerbaijani capital of Baku in 1924. He spent his childhood there and took his first degree at the Azerbaijan State University. By the time he entered university he had served in the Second World War, taking part in battles against the Germans in Ukraine, Belorussia and the Baltic states. Serving as a gunner, he survived the traumas of the front with nothing worse than impaired hearing.

A Russified Armenian, Shakhnazarov spent the greater part of his life in Moscow. He took the Russian equivalent of a Ph.D. at what, in the early post-war years, was the Moscow Institute of Law and later was awarded a higher doctorate. From 1987 he was a Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences. To a remarkable extent, given the constraints of life in the Soviet Union, Shakhnazarov succeeded in combining a career in politics with serious scholarship. An immensely cultured man, well read in the literatures of several countries, he was a creative writer as well as a political analyst, and published several works of science fiction in the pre-reform Soviet Union, thinly disguised as 'Georgy Shakh'.

From 1952 to 1964 Shakhnazarov headed the editorial team in the main Soviet political publishing house, Politizdat, and contributed to some of the revision of previous ideological precepts which occurred during the Khrushchev years. He then joined his friend, Fedor Burlatsky, as a member of the team of consultants Yury Andropov had gathered together in a department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party responsible for relations with other Communist states. Apart from a spell in Prague, working on the journal, 'Problems of Peace and Socialism', Shakhnazarov remained in that department of the Central Committee apparatus until 1988. From 1972 he was one of its deputy heads and from 1986 First Deputy Head. Both the Prague alumni and the group of Andropov's consultants (from Andropov's pre-KGB years) turned out to be a rich repository of reformist ideas when at last in 1985 a General Secretary came to power who was prepared to be listen to them.

Shakhnazarov was already an informal adviser to Gorbachev before he joined his staff full-time in 1988 as his aide on Eastern European matters and on reform of the political system. Always a reformer within the limits of the possible and an opponent of Soviet hard-liners, Shakhnazarov was wholly supportive of Gorbachev's insistence that there would be no more military interventions in Eastern Europe, even as one country after another in the region declared its independence and ceased to be a Communist state. As a political adviser, Shakhnazarov was the most influential proponent of the idea that - in the process of transferring political power from the Communist Party to new state institutions - the Soviet Union should adopt a model based on the French Fifth Republic with both a President and a Prime Minister, the former being the major foreign policy decision-maker and the latter having day-to-day oversight of the economy. Shakhnazarov's impact on Russian institutions is felt to this day, for the Russian Federation simply copied the system of the dual executive (or semi-presidentialism) that had been established in the Soviet Union in 1990.

While Shakhnazarov came fully into his own with the advent of Gorbachev, the introduction of glasnost, and an atmosphere conducive to reform, even earlier he had been an important link between the party apparatus and the Russian intelligentsia as well as with foreign scholars. For many years he was President of the Soviet Association of Political Sciences, in which capacity he led Soviet delegations to the conferences of the International Political Science Association. It was a minor triumph for Shakhnazarov when IPSA held its triennial conference in Moscow in 1979, even though the KGB and conservative Communists were deeply concerned by the simultaneous arrival of large numbers of Western political scientists, including numerous Sovietologists. Shakhnazarov, in the pre-Gorbachev Soviet Union, used his party position to protect, to the best of his ability, independent-minded political analysts within Russian research institutes. Following Gorbachev's coming to power, his contacts with Western professional students of politics, together with his knowledge of foreign political institutions and political literature, helped to ensure that he was a key contributor to discussion on political reform within Gorbachev's inner circle.

Even more important, though, was Shakhnazarov's intelligence, sharp analytical mind, and shrewd political judgement. He suppported the transformation of the Soviet political system - what he saw as its deliberate piecemeal dismantling by Gorbachev from 1988 onwards. In contrast, as someone who felt the whole of the Soviet Union to be his homeland, he greatly regretted the total disintegration of the USSR. He had worked hard in the last years of the Soviet era to attempt to turn it into a genuine federation or looser confederation. Accordingly, he was highly critical of Boris Yeltsin's contribution to the demise of the Soviet state (as distinct from the Soviet system) and, indeed, of much that has occurred in post-Soviet Russia. For decades a closet social democrat within the upper echelons of the Communist Party apparatus, Shakhnazarov was able to 'come out' in the second half of the 1980s and he continued to try to find ways of combining social justice with political freedom.

As early as 1972, in a book which combined Soviet orthodoxy with innovative ideas for that time and place, Shakhnazarov advocated a freer flow of information to Soviet citizens and acknowledged the existence of different interests within Soviet society. During Chernenko's general secretary secretaryship in 1984, he published an article implicitly critical of Soviet as well as of American foreign and defence policy, arguing that 'political ends do not exist that would justify the use of means liable to lead to nuclear war'. He became, naturally, as firm a supporter of Gorbachev's attempt to bring the Cold War to an end as he was of his most radically reformist domestic changes.

In the post-Soviet era Shakhnazarov headed the Centre for Global Programmes at the Gorbachev Foundation and wrote illuminatingly on globalization issues. He also published an important volume of political memoirs in Moscow in 1993, The Price of Freedom: Gorbachev's Reformation Through The Eyes of His Aide, which should have been translated into English, but was not. Shakhnazarov enjoyed the respect of younger scholars who had not been part of the Soviet system in the way he was, since they understood that behind the monolithic façade which the Soviet Communist Party presented to the outside world there were very different personality types and value systems. The Russian Political Science Association, now led by a new generation of scholars, is holding a memorial meeting to honour Shakhnazarov's memory and achievements. Georgy Shakhnazarov is survived by his only son, Karen Shakhnazarov, one of Russia's leading film directors and the head of Mosfilm studios.

 

ИЗ ПРОТОКОЛА СОВМЕСТНОГО ЗАСЕДАНИЯ
ПРАВЛЕНИЯ И НАУЧНОГО СОВЕТА
РОССИЙСКОЙ АССОЦИАЦИИ ПОЛИТИЧЕСКОЙ НАУКИ
ОТ 4 ИЮЛЯ 2001 Г.

 

Присутствовали:

президент РАПН Ю.С. Пивоваров, I-е вице-президенты А.И. Никитин, В.В. Смирнов, вице-президенты В.А. Гуторов, А.К. Сорокин, И.Г. Яковлев, председатель правления РАПН С.В. Патрушев, члены правления В.С. Авдонин, О.В. Гаман-Голутвина, В.К. Егоров, С.Е. Заславский, В.В. Лапкин, М.М. Лебедева, С.А. Марков, Б.В. Межуев, С.К. Ознобищев, Т.Г. Пархалина, Р.Ф. Туровский, М.Н. Филатова, П.А. Федосов, ученый секретарь РАПН А.Л. Шаталов, председатель научного совета РАПН А.И. Соловьев, члены совета С.Г. Айвазова, Т.А. Алексеева, Л.Н. Верченов, А.А. Дегтярев, Г.В. Голосов, Б.Г. Капустин, А.Ю. Мельвиль, Е.Б. Шестопал.

Слушали:

Об учреждении премии имени Г.Х. Шахназарова.

Выступили: Соловьев А.И., Пивоваров Ю.С., Ильин М.В., Патрушев С.В., Капустин Б.Г., Гуторов В.А., Смирнов В.В., Никитин А.И., Сорокин А.К.

Решили:

1. Учредить премию Г.Х. Шахназарова за крупный вклад в развитие российской политической науки, выразившейся в создании научных и преподавательских школ, исследовательских направлений и политологических центров.

2. Утвердить «Положение о премии имени Георгия Хосроевича Шахназарова».

 

Президент

Российской ассоциации политической науки

Ю.Н. Пивоваров

Ученый секретарь РАПН

А.Л. Шаталов

ПОЛОЖЕНИЕ
О ПРЕМИИ ИМЕНИ ГЕОРГИЯ ХОСРОЕВИЧА ШАХНАЗАРОВА

Общие положения

В целях содействия разработке перспективных направлений политической науки, оказания материальной поддержки профессиональной политологической деятельности, усиления интеграции исследователей разных поколений и объединения научного сообщества и в память об одном из основателей и организаторов современной политологии Российская ассоциация политической науки учредила премию Г.Х. Шахназарова за крупный вклад в развитие российской политической науки, выразившейся в создании научных и преподавательских школ, исследовательских направлений и политологических центров.

1. Премия присуждается раз в 2 года. Вручение премий происходит на очередных Всероссийских конгрессах политологов.

2. Лауреаты премии получают нагрудные знаки с изображениями Г.Х. Шахназарова, а также дипломы и денежные премии.

В зависимости от состояния материальных ресурсов РАПН денежное содержание премий может изменяться. Решение принимается комиссией по представлению Президента РАПН.

3. Лауреаты премии Г.Х. Шахназарова обладают правом публикации отмеченных работ в издательстве РОССПЭН.

4. Премия Г.Х. Шахназарова является индивидуальной и не допускает награждения коллективов авторов.

5. Один и тот ученый не может быть отмечен этой премией повторно.

Порядок выдвижения соискателей премии и требования к ним.

6. Руководство РАПН объявляет о начале выдвижения соискателей в январе года проведения очередного Конгресса политологов России. Срок завершения приема заявок - ноябрь того же года.

7. Правом выдвижения соискателей на премию обладают: Президиум РАН, ученые советы институтов РАН, университетов и других высших учебных заведений, коллегии Министерства образования и Министерства науки и техники, руководящие органы РАПН, Академии политической науки.

8. Соискателями премий могут быть лица, имеющие высшее образование, из числа граждан Российской Федерации, являющихся сотрудниками научных организаций, высших учебных заведений, докторантами.