Shakhnazarov was an early advocate of reform and helped Gorbachev to shape his plans to open up the system to new ideas and freedoms, but, like his boss, he failed to articulate a clear vision of where he believed the country should go.
Shakhnazarov was staying at a sanatorium close to the presidential dacha at Foros in the Crimea that fateful August 1991, when he helped Gorbachev in his plans for a new Union Treaty to define relations between the republics.
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's International Department—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 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.