Tatyana I. Zaslavskaya, an economic sociologist known for telling harsh truths about the state of the Soviet Union and a researcher whose views came to influence Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s economic policies, died on Aug. 23 in Moscow. …
Ms. Zaslavskaya was a founder of the All-Union Center for the Study of Public Opinion, created by the Soviet government during the era of perestroika, and ran it until 1992. While there, Mr. Gudkov said, she was instrumental in lifting the status of Soviet sociology from something regarded as “a bourgeois science” to an officially recognized field of university study. [cont.]
Sophia Kishkovsky, New York Times