Lev Timofeev

Lev Timofeev (Russian: Лев Михайлович Тимофеев), (born 1936), is a Russian economist, political commentator and novelist. The son of a high-ranking Russian government official, Timofeev graduated from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations.

Career

In the late 1960s and 70s, Timofeev worked as a journalist for the Moscow magazines, like Novyi Mir, Kommunist, etc. In 1985 Timofeev's book "The Technology of the Black Market or the Peasant Art of Starving" was published in the West by Telos Press. The book presented a harsh condemnation of the Communist economic system.

Timofeev was consequently arrested and sentenced to 11 years of hard labour on the grounds of "anti-soviet propaganda". He was freed in 1987 by a special decree signed by Mikhail Gorbachev. In the late 1980s, Timofeev published the Referendum magazine and also served as the chairman of the Moscow Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, a human rights watchdog. As and economist, Timofeev became one of the most vocal proponent of economic liberalism in Russia.

In 1993 Timofeev ran for the parliamentary seat on the Democratic Russia ticket. Appointed professor at the Russian State Humanitarian University, Timofeev was for many years director of the Center for Research on Extralegal Economic Systems and advised the government of Boris Yeltsin. In the mid-1990s he joined the Transnational Radical Party and became member of its General Council. Timofeev was the leading theorist of the drug-use depenalization.

In the early 2000 Timofeev retired from politics and teaching and embarked on a career of a novelist: since 2004 he published two novels and a collection of short stories. His 2006 novel "Negative" was nominated for the Booker Prize.