Georgiy Shakhnazarov

Georgy Khosroyevich Shakhnazarov (Armenian: Գեորգի Խոսրովի Շահնազարով) was a Soviet and Russian political scientist, politician, writer, Doctor of Juridical Sciences, corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1987), and laureate of the USSR State Prize (1980).

Georgy Shakhnazarov was the father of Karen Shakhnazarov, a Soviet and Russian film director, general director of the Mosfilm film studio, and People’s Artist of Russia. Georgy Shakhnazarov was born in Baku into a lawyer’s family. His father, a Karabakh Armenian living in Baku, belonged to the princely Melik-Shakhnazaryan family, but after the revolution in Russia was forced to change his surname to Shakhnazarov. During the Great Patriotic War, Georgy Shakhnazarov was commander of a fire platoon in the 1095th Army gun-artillery regiment, commander of a control platoon of the battery of the 150th Sevastopol, Order of Kutuzov, Army gun-artillery brigade; he took part in the crossing of the Perekop Isthmus and in the liberation of Sevastopol, Minsk, Lithuania, and in the capture of Königsberg. After the war he graduated from the Faculty of Law of Azerbaijan State University (1949) and the postgraduate program of the Institute of Law of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1952). He defended his candidate’s dissertation on the topic “Forms of the Bourgeois State in the Era of Imperialism” (1952). From 1952 to 1960 he worked at Politizdat, and from 1960 to 1964 at the journals Political Self-Education and Problems of Peace and Socialism. From 1964 to 1988 he was a consultant, and later deputy head of the International Department in the apparatus of the Central Committee of the CPSU (since 1972, responsible for relations with the German Democratic Republic, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Cuba). Even in those years, Georgy Shakhnazarov was actively engaged in scholarly work. He is considered one of the founders of political science in the USSR. The main focus of