The analysis of the economic situation in Soviet agriculture led Zaslavskaya to the conclusion that the revealed problems cannot be explained without sociological analysis, which bordered with
blasphemy within the canonical
Marxist science, which postulated that the development of the society is derived from the economical relations, and not vice versa. At these times Soviet
sociology was under the tight scrutiny of the Communist Party (from the position of
bourgeois pseudoscience through a brief period of liberalisation during the
Khrushchev Thaw to sharp criticism during the
Leonid Brezhnev era). The remoteness and relative scientific freedom of the young department of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union at Novosibirsk allowed Zaslavskaya to do her research in sociology of the agricultural sector by studying the
Siberian countryside,
Altai Krai in particular. In the later years of the Soviet Union accurate detailed information regarding conditions in Soviet agriculture was considered a state secret when not censored outright. A major breach in security occurred in 1983 when the details of a classified paper, "for internal use only", the report from the closed conference in Novosibirsk by Tatyana Zaslavskaya regarding the crisis in Soviet agriculture, were published in
The Washington Post. Zaslavskaya was the author of a number of works in
Russian which deal with economics and social conditions in Soviet agriculture although some of her work was suppressed by Soviet censors. For example,
The Methodology of Comparing Labour Productivity in Agriculture in the USSR and the USA, written together with M.I. Sidorova, was suppressed due to its pessimistic results. In 1988 Zaslavskaya came back to Moscow for the formation of the
Russian Public Opinion Research Center, which she was the director of until 1992. Afterwards she became the honorable president of RPORC and later the honorable president of the Analytical Center of Yuri Levada (the
Levada Center since 2004). In 1993 she became the co-president of the Interdisciplinary academic center of social sciences (Russian: ). Since 1993 the "Intercenter" has been carrying out ten annual international conferences concerning the question: "Where is Russia going?" under Zaslavskaya's direction. Many representatives of different sciences (historians, jurists, sociologists, economists, political scientists, culturologists, and philosophers) participate in these conferences debating topics such as a better judgment of the
post-communist transformation processes or modern problems and prospects of development of the Russian society. Zaslavskaya's arguments evolved over time. In the
Second Socialist Revolution she imagined the possibility that the USSR was experiencing a democratic revolution that would make Russia genuinely socialist. In the next two decades she puzzled over the form and nature of the transition that actually took place in Russia arguing in 1999 that it was some kind of revolution but then in 2002 concluding that "there was no new social revolution in Russia." She saw social change as occurring through crises involving "random transformation" as in the 1990s the Yelt'sin group lost control of the situation. This led her to try to devise various analyses of social groupings and models of change which tended to description and classification. She died in 2013 having left her role as a member of parliament twenty years before to teach and write. She was survived by her husband Mikhail and her daughter Oksana. ==Memberships and awards==