ZASLAVSKAYA, TATIANA IVANOVNA

(b. 1927), economist and influential sociologist.

Tatiana Ivanovna Zaslavskaya graduated from the Economics Faculty of Moscow University in 1950 and became a member of the Communist Party in 1954. She completed a doctoral thesis for the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Economics, Department of Agriculture, where she worked until 1963. In that year, Zaslavskaya moved to the Novosibirsk Institute of Industrial Economics to work with Abel Aganbegyan. She subsequently became head of the Institute's Sociology Department, in 1968. At the same time, Zaslavskaya became a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, becoming a full member in 1981. From the late 1960s she headed the Social Problems department of the Siberian branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, where she remained until the mid-1980s. During this period, Zaslavskaya developed a model capable of predicting trends in Soviet agriculture.

Zaslavskaya came to prominence in early 1980s, when her Novosibirsk report was leaked to the public. Later on, when Mikhail Gorbachev was introducing his policies of glasnost and perestroika, Zaslavskaya became a key player and senior government adviser in the field of socioeconomic and agricultural reform, from 1985 to 1987. She was elected to the Congress of People's Deputies in 1989 as Russian Academy of Sciences representative. In 1986 Zaslavskaya was elected President of the Soviet Sociological Association, before moving on to head to the new Institute of Sociology in 1987 and the Centre for the Study of Public Opinion (VTs-IOM) in 1988. In 1990 Boris Yeltsin elected Zaslavskaya to his consultative council. Since then Zaslavskaya has gone on to become head of the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences.

See also: academy of sciences; novosibirsk report; perestroika

bibliography

Yanowitch, Murray, ed. (1989). Voices of Reform: Essays by Tatiana I. Yaslavskaya. Armonk, NY and London:M. E. Sharpe.

Christopher Williams