Congress of People's Deputies of the Soviet Union
He became director of the Institute of Economics of the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1986. He was a member of the Congress of People's Deputies of the Soviet Union with special responsibility for economic affairs. He later worked as an advisor to Presidents Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, and was the second-in-command of Premier Nikolai Ryzhkov's government. Under Gorbachev he was one of the major advocates of rapid economic reform, with the consultancy of the Italian economist Giancarlo Pallavicini, and in 1998 became a member of the Economic Crisis Group.