Biographers highlight the role of the mother in shaping Alexander's personality: Zinoviev recalled with love and respect her worldly wisdom and religious convictions, which determined the rules of behavior in the house.

[3][4][2] As biographers noted, in his youth, Zinoviev was seized with the desire to "build a new world" and faith in a "bright future", he was fascinated by dreams of social justice, the ideas of equality and collectivism, material asceticism; his idols were Spartacus, Robespierre, Decembrists and Populists.

In Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History, at the next Komsomol meeting at the end of 1939, Zinoviev emotionally spoke about the troubles and injustices that took place in the village, and openly criticized the personality cult of Stalin.

The work in the wall newspaper helped him to overcome the situation and focus on philosophy, where he began writing epigrams, parodies, humorous poems, and wrote colorful "life stories" that, Pavel Fokin noted, seemed so plausible that even the author sometimes believed in them.

[3] In the post-war years, the faculty of philosophy was "on the forefront" of the ideological front – the "biggest event" was the speech of the secretary of the Central Committee Andrei Zhdanov (1947), followed by the strengthening of the party's role in philosophical education.

Vladislav Lektorsky connects the turn of Zinoviev and Ilyenkov to the study of theoretical thinking and methodology with the conviction that strict knowledge can influence bureaucratic "real socialism" and reform the Soviet system.

[3] Zinoviev's Ph.D. thesis "The Method of Ascent from the Abstract to the Concrete (on the Material of Karl Marx's "Capital") was twice "filled up" at the Faculty Academic Council, it was possible to defend oneself from the third time, already in Higher Attestation Commission,[8][10] in September 1954.

Group mates (Mamardashvili and others) considered the choice of mathematical logic as an academic career as a departure from the struggle in the direction of security and well-being; Zinoviev's disciple Yury Solodukhin drew attention to his disappointment in the speculative nature of Marxism.

[3][4] The latest libel [the "Bright Future" novel] contains extremely cynical slanderous fabrications about Soviet reality, the theory and practice of communist construction, and offensive attacks against Vladimir Lenin, our party and its leadership.

According to the Committee for State Security note, criminal prosecution would lead to placement in a psychiatric institution (Zinoviev was characterized as a "mentally unstable" former alcoholic suffering from "delusions of grandeur"), which was considered inexpedient because of the campaign against Soviet psychiatry in the West.

Since 1985, in numerous articles and speeches, he asserted that the social system in the Soviet Union would not change, restructuring he considered bureaucratic formality, and her initiatives – from glasnost to the anti-alcohol campaign – a manifestation of the leadership's inability to adequately assess real problems.

[3] As a critic of Gorbachev and the restructuring of Zinoviev in March 1990, he was invited to a debate on the French TV channel with "disgraced" Boris Yeltsin, then the Soviet Union People's Deputy, little-known in Europe.

In 1990 in the Soviet Union with a circulation of 250 thousand copies "Yawning Heights" were released, in 1991 the novels "Homo Soveticus", "Para Bellum" and "Go to Golgatha" were published (in the magazine "Smena"); at the same time, the Higher Attestation Commission restored his academic degrees.

The characters criticize government policy and ridicule Soviet leaders, discuss economic problems, sympathize with dissidents and anti-Soviet terrorists, are interested in samizdat and Western radio stations, and have some sort of relationship with the State Security Committee.

[3] Michael Kirkwood considers Zinoviev's creativity to the literary criticism of the "letter" fashionable in the 1970s (Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes), as a never-ending process produced, according to Bart, as a "scriptor" and not "the author".

[20][31] Zinoviev did not attach much importance to artistic sophistication, his main books, especially "Yawning Heights" (in the words of Peter Weil and Alexander Genis, "an amorphous pile of pages"), were intended for Soviet readers and inevitably lost some of their meaning in the translation.

[20][31] "A Bright Future" describes the poverty, lies and spiritual emptiness of Soviet life on the example of the moral degradation of the sixties intellectual, a mediocre person who started his career in Stalin's time and achieved success during the "thaw".

"The Yellow House" continues the satire on the "progressive Soviet intelligentsia", exposes its duplicity, combining conformism with an orientation to the West; unwillingness to associate themselves with the people while preserving their instincts; meaningless parasitism on the texts of "bourgeois science".

From a methodological point of view, logical sociology as a rigorous scientific theory was based on two rules: first, the refusal to consider any propositions as a priori true; secondly, the need for a precise definition of the meaning of any term, which would eliminate ambiguity and vagueness.

[4][39] Periodic ritual exile and punishment of external enemies ("renegades") in the course of mass harassment demonstrate the cohesion of social cells and reproduce the mechanisms of subordination, these collective actions relieve the psychological burden of individual responsibility.

According to the British commentator Philip Hanson, the assessment of the geographical distribution of Westernism has a clear resemblance to the work of the English economist Angus Maddison; the criticism of globalization and the American imperial project echoes the views of Noam Chomsky and Niall Ferguson and the moderate positions of Eric Hobsbawm.

The future society of a "global cheloveynik" is reminiscent of Soviet communism: a person is impersonal, turns into a function, a half-robot, human relations are replaced by virtual ones in conditions of total distortion of information and the domination of ideology.

In general, the work of Zinoviev corresponded to the level of scientific achievements in the field of non-classical logic of the time, highly valued by such logicians as Kazimir Aydukevich, Jozef Bohensky, Georg von Wright, but did not attract much attention in the West.

[6][33][45] The naive desire to learn society as a "reality" with the help of the method excluding interpretations reflected the influence of Hegel and Marxism (ideas about the real and reasonable identities) and did not withstand the criteria of Kant established for scientific knowledge (distinction between phenomenon and noumenon).

Claude Lefort in 1989 summarized:[48] I immediately felt in Zinoviev an intellectual who is prone to paradoxes, who seeks to refute all established opinions and considers himself able to show that this fragmented, atomized society ultimately wants only to maintain a system that guarantees the advantages of inertness and corruption.

According to Hanson, Zinoviev's large-scale historical scheme clearly expressed and partly anticipated the public mindset in modern Russia, especially the views of the ruling elite of the Putin era: a feeling of humiliation, anti-Americanism and regret about the collapse of the Soviet Union.

According to Konstantin Krylov, Russian intellectuals, as a rule, spoke of him with "simplicity of fastidiousness", considered him to be "Ivan who does not know how to flicker foppishly, does not quote Foucault and Marcuse" and whose "glamorous" constructions are not suitable for "discourse".

[16] A number of commentators believe that Zinoviev thought not in the form of rigorous systematic knowledge, not with the help of scientific concepts, but through images, metaphors, allegories,[49] deliberately eliminating the separation between philosophy and literature to best describe reality.

[51] Russian-American philosopher and sociologist Oleg Kharkhordin considered "Communism as Reality" the best introduction to the sociology of Soviet life, noting the exceptional "clarity and power" of Zinoviev's conceptualization of informal activity.

Mezhuyev did not doubt the sincerity of the convictions of the "outstanding thinker", but noted that even the "best people of Russia" manifest radicalism, infantilism, hatred of moderation, nonviolence, harmony and compromise, characteristic of the Russian mentality.