From 1952 to 1961 he was an editor at the publisher Politizdat, where he began writing books (one of his first was Burzhuaznoe gosudartsvo v epokhu imperializma ­ "The Bourgeois State in an Age of Imperialism", 1955).In the 1960s and 1970s he spent two spells at the international Communist magazine Problems of Peace and Socialism, based in Prague, giving him a wider perspective on the world than many of his colleagues in the party establishment.His political career in the Central Committee apparatus ­ which he joined in the early 1960s ­ was promoted by Fyodor Burlatsky, a member of the Socialist Countries Department who had the ear of Yuri Andropov. In March 1988 he was plucked from the department by Gorbachev to be a full-time adviser. At the same time he was building a parallel career as a political scientist and contributed to the professionalisation of the field in the later Soviet era. In 1974 he became president of the Soviet Association of Political Sciences. In published works he recognised that Soviet society had different interest groups ­ an implicit rejection of a homogenised, communist society ­ and advocated a greater flow of information at a time of paranoid secrecy. He also publicly rejected the use of nuclear weapons to achieve political goals.A member of the Academy of Sciences, he was elected on the academy's list to the first semi-free Soviet parliament, the Congress of People's Deputies, when it was inaugurated in 1989. He was a member of the commission to draw up a new Soviet constitution.Shakhnazarov wrote up his memoirs of the Gorbachev years as Tsena svobody: reformatsiia Gorbacheva glazami ego pomoshchnika ("The Price of Freedom: Gorbachev's reformation through the eyes of his aide", 1993) He was also the author of science fiction and plays.

His son, Karen Shakhnazarov, born in 1952, is a noted film director.More radical than Gorbachev, Georgy Shakhnazarov contributed to the destruction of the system of which he had been a member, working tactically to abolish such anachronisms as the Communist Party monopoly on power. "As often happens in revolutionary situations," he later recalled, "there are things which seem banal today but which you couldn't even mention then." Felix Corley. Robert Shackleton was a brilliant field geologist and observer, possibly the last of the true field geologists, willing to get his feet wet in Irish bogs or walking miles through African scrub with a column of bearers. Robert Millner Shackleton, geologist: born Purley, Surrey 30 December 1909; Beit Fellow, Imperial College 1932-34, staff 1936-40, 1945-48; Chief Geologist to Whitehall Explorations, Fiji 1935-36; geologist, Mining and Geological Department, Kenya 1940-45; Herdman Professor of Geology, Liverpool University 1948-62; Professor of Geology, Leeds University 1962-75 (Emeritus), Director, Research Institute of African Geology 1966-75; FRS 1971; Honorary Senior Research Fellow, Open University 1977-2001; married 1934 Gwen Harland (one son, two daughters; marriage dissolved 1949), 1949 Judith Jeffreys (one son, one daughter; marriage dissolved 1978), 1984 Peigi Wallace (died 2001); died East Hendred, Oxfordshire 3 May 2001. Robert Shackleton was a brilliant field geologist and observer, possibly the last of the true field geologists, willing to get his feet wet in Irish bogs or walking miles through African scrub with a column of bearers. To many of his colleagues, he seemed indestructible.A first cousin once removed of Sir Ernest Shackleton, he had his own share of adventures.

In Africa he was tossed by a rhino and then, almost immediately, bitten by a puff adder. He had a tremendous quest for knowledge, and little regard for self-comfort in this quest. At the age of 75 he led a pioneering Royal Society geological traverse across Tibet, in collaboration with Academica Sinica, Beijing The Chinese provided oxygen for the highest-altitude areas. Of course Shackleton needed no such help; it was we younger geologists who had the problems. He was born in 1909, brought up in a Quaker environment and educated at Sidcot School, Somerset. He went to Liverpool University, obtaining a BSc (Hons) in 1931 and a PhD in 1934, at which time he began his innovative research on the geology of Snowdonia.