RUSSIA - May 15 - Shakhnazarov Dies.

Georgi Shakhnazarov, 77, a propagandist and political scientist of the Soviet era who rose to become a pro-reform assistant to Pres. Mikhail Gorbachev in the final years of the Soviet Union, dies after an academic conference in Tula. (After a career of spreading the word of the Soviet variation of socialism, Shakhnazarov was pulled into Gorbachev's inner circle in 1989 as the Soviet leader struggled to reform the Communist Party while maneuvering between conservatives, opposed to reform and liberals. An ethnic Armenian, Shakhnazarov was among those Soviet intellectuals working inside the system who felt their first liberal stirrings during the early 1960s thaw engendered by Nikita Khrushchev, and who recoiled at the Soviet crackdown against the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia in 1968. It was Shakhnazarov's liberalism, which flowered among a group of staff members who served Yuri Andropov - the Soviet leader from 1982 to 1984 - that drove Shakhnazarov to champion the Gorbachev reforms).