Turchin was born in 1931 in
Podolsk,
Soviet Union. In 1952, he graduated from Moscow University with a degree in Theoretical Physics and got his Ph.D. in 1957. After working on neutron and solid-state physics at the Institute for Physics of Energy in Obninsk, in 1964 he accepted a position at the
Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics in Moscow. There he worked on statistical regularization methods and authored REFAL, one of the first AI languages and the AI language of choice in the Soviet Union. In the 1960s, Turchin became politically active. In the Fall of 1968, he wrote the pamphlet
The Inertia of Fear, which was quite widely circulated in
samizdat, the writing began to be circulated under the title
The Inertia of Fear: Socialism and Totalitarianism in Moscow in 1976. Following its publication in the underground press, he lost his research laboratory. In 1970 he authored "The Phenomenon of Science", a grand cybernetic meta-theory of universal evolution, which broadened and deepened the earlier book. By 1973, Turchin had founded the Moscow chapter of
Amnesty International with
Andrey Tverdokhlebov and was working closely with the well-known physicist and Soviet dissident
Andrei Sakharov. In 1974 he lost his position at the Institute and was persecuted by the
KGB. Facing almost certain imprisonment, he and his family were forced to emigrate from the Soviet Union in 1977. He went to New York, where he joined the faculty of the
City College of New York in 1979. In 1990, together with
Cliff Joslyn and
Francis Heylighen, he founded the
Principia Cybernetica Project, a worldwide organization devoted to the collaborative development of an evolutionary-cybernetic philosophy. In 1998, he co-founded the software start-up SuperCompilers, LLC. He retired from his post as Professor of Computer Science at
City College in 1999. A resident of
Oakland, New Jersey, he died there on 7 April 2010. He has two sons named
Peter Turchin (a specialist in
population dynamics and the
mathematical modeling of historical dynamics) and Dimitri Turchin. ==Work==