Tatyana I. Zaslavskaya, Adviser to Gorbachev, Dies at 86 Alexander Zemlianichenko/Associated Press Tatyana I. Zaslavskaya, who influenced the economic policies of Mikhail S. Gorbachev, with him in Moscow in 2011. MOSCOW - Tatyana I. Zaslavskaya, an economic sociologist known for telling harsh truths about the state of the Soviet Union and a researcher whose views came to influence Mikhail S. Gorbachev's economic policies, died on Aug. 23 in Moscow. She was 86. The cause was complications of a brain injury after a fall, said Lev D. Gudkov, the director of the Levada Center, an independent polling agency where Ms. Zaslavskaya was chairwoman. Although she did not hold a high government position, Ms. Zaslavskaya was considered a member of Mr. Gorbachev's circle of advisers, and she not only helped him shape his economic policy but also promoted it in print. Ms. Zaslavskaya was a founder of the All-Union Center for the Study of Public Opinion, created by the Soviet government during the era of perestroika, and ran it until 1992. While there, Mr. Gudkov said, she was instrumental in lifting the status of Soviet sociology from something regarded as "a bourgeois science" to an officially recognized field of university study. Ms. Zaslavskaya, whose primary focus was Soviet agriculture, was never a political dissident. But she nonetheless received considerable criticism in the Soviet era for her socioeconomic findings. "She was the first to show the processes of degradation taking place in the Soviet collective farm village," Mr. Gudkov said. In 1983, at a closed conference, she presented a report called "About the Perfection of Socialist Relations of Production and Problems of Economic Sociology." While couching her analysis in Marxist terminology, she tore apart the overall state of the Soviet economy. Since its creation, she said, "this system has been repeatedly corrected, renewed and perfected, but had never been subject to qualitative perestroika." The word "perestroika," meaning restructuring, would become Mr. Gorbachev's byword for economic overhaul. The K.G.B. confiscated copies of the classified paper, but the report made its way to the West and details were published in The Washington Post. It came to be known as the Novosibirsk Report, after the city near the research center of Akademgorodok, a branch of the Siberian division of the Soviet Academy of Sciences built in the 1950s. Akademgorodok became a haven for academics who questioned the Soviet system, within certain bounds. "She was able, unlike anyone else among Soviet social researchers, to find the balance between academic honesty and the official demands of the authorities," said Leonid Kosals, a professor of sociology at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow and a visiting professor at the University of Toronto, who was Ms. Zaslavskaya's student in Novosibirsk. She never wrote anything that could be shameful to her in 10 or 20 years. Ms. Zaslavskaya initially studied physics at Moscow State University but switched to economics before graduating in 1950. She joined the Novosibirsk Institute of Economics and Organization of Industrial Production in Akademgorodok in 1963 and remained there until she returned to Moscow to run the All-Union Center, conducting research on life in Siberian villages, which became the basis of the Novosibirsk Report. The director of the institute, Abel Aganbegyan, encouraged Ms. Zaslavskaya to teach students about her research methods. Mr. Aganbegyan became one of Mr. Gorbachev's chief economic advisers, and Ms. Zaslavskaya's studies of Soviet agriculture came to influence government policy. In 1989 she was elected to the Congress of People's Deputies, a legislative body created by Mr. Gorbachev, and became a member of the Interregional Deputies Group, led by the dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov, which at the time was the closest thing to an organized political opposition in the Soviet government. She was also one of a handful of female members of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Tatyana Ivanovna Karpova was born in Kiev, then part of the Soviet Union, on April 9, 1927, to Ivan Karpov and the former Tatyana de Metz. Her maternal grandfather was an eminent scholar who had roots in Belgium and was in the Russian nobility. Her father, who came from a peasant family, also became a scholar. Survivors include her husband, Mikhail Zaslavsky, and a daughter, Oksana. In a series of interviews she gave from 2005 to 2007 to Boris Doktorov, a professor of sociology who has been compiling the biographies of Russian sociologists, Ms. Zaslavskaya spoke of her lifelong love and understanding of the Russian village, and of her realization that there was a drastic difference between Soviet reality and propaganda. The poverty of postwar Soviet villages was "shocking," she said. I could not remain indifferent to the sense of social injustice against a rather significant part of society that was close to my heart.