Alexander Alexandrovich Zinoviev (Russian: Алекса́ндр Алекса́ндрович Зино́вьев; 29 October 1922 – 10 May 2006) was a Soviet philosopher, writer, sociologist and journalist.

Coming from a poor peasant family, a participant in World War II, Alexander Zinoviev in the 1950s and 1960s was one of the symbols of the rebirth of philosophical thought in the Soviet Union. After the publication in the West of the screening book Yawning Heights, which brought Zinoviev world fame, in 1978 he was expelled from the country and deprived of Soviet citizenship. He returned to Russia in 1999.

The creative heritage of Zinoviev includes about 40 books, covering a number of areas of knowledge: sociology, social philosophy, mathematical logic, ethics, political thought. Most of his work is difficult to attribute to any tendency or to put in any framework, including academic. Having gained fame in the 1960s as a researcher of non-classical logic, in exile, Zinoviev was forced to become a professional writer, considering himself primarily a sociologist. Works in the original genre of the 'sociological novel' brought international recognition to Zinoviev. Often he is characterized as an independent Russian thinker, one of the greatest, most original and controversial figures of Russian social thought of the second half of the 20th century.

An anti-Stalinist in his youth, Zinoviev throughout his life held strong views on society, criticizing at first the Soviet system, then the Russian political system and the Western world, and at the end of his life, the processes of globalization. Zinoviev's worldview was distinguished by tragedy and pessimism. In the West, as in Russia, his non-conformist views were harshly criticized.

Alexander Alexandrovich Zinoviev was born in the village of Pakhtino in the Chukhlomskoy Uyezd of Kostroma Governorate in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (now the Chukhlomsky District of the Kostroma Oblast). He was the sixth child of Alexander Yakovlevich Zinoviev, a worker, and Apollinaria Vasilyevna (born Smirnova). The ancestors of Zinoviev, first mentioned in mid-18th-century documents, were state peasants. Zinoviev's father spent most of his time working in Moscow while living in the countryside. This gave him a Moscow residence permit, which probably saved his family from reprisals during the time of dekulakization. Before the revolution, Alexander Yakovlevich was an artist who decorated churches and painted icons, later expanding into finishing work and stencilling. Zinoviev somewhat disdainfully dismissed his father's profession as "painter." Alexander Yakovlevich had a keen interest in art. He provided his children with art supplies, illustrated magazines and books. Zinoviev's mother came from a wealthy family who owned property in Saint Petersburg. The Zinovievs, whose house stood in the center of the village, were respected in the district and often hosted guests. Biographers highlight the role of the mother in shaping Alexander's personality: Zinoviev recalled with love and respect her worldly wisdom and religious convictions, which determined the rules of behavior in the house. The family, however, was not religious. His father was a non-believer; his mother, although a believer, was indifferent to Church rites. From childhood, Alexander became a staunch atheist, looking all his life upon Orthodoxy, the church and its clergy with disgust. He considered atheism the only scientific component of Soviet Marxism.

Alexander from early childhood stood out for his abilities, he was immediately transferred to the second class. As children grew older, their father took them to the capital. In 1933, after graduating from elementary school, Alexander, on the advice of a mathematics teacher, was sent to Moscow. He lived with relatives in a 10-meter basement room on Bolshaya Spasskaya Street. Due to the impracticality of his father, he had to deal with economic issues. Beggarly living conditions combined with interesting activities; in those years, the Soviet state actively modernized school education, and the reforms were accompanied by the propaganda of its social significance. Alexander studied successfully; he liked mathematics and literature most of all. His participation in the drawing circle did not work out – his drawings revealed the features of caricatures, the confusion happened with the redrawing of the portrait of Stalin for the Stalin's room; The experience in the drama club was also unsuccessful (Alexander didn't have a hearing or voice). He read a lot additionally, was a frequenter of libraries; he read classics, both domestic and foreign. In high school, he was already familiar with a large number of philosophical works – from Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau to Marx, Engels and Herzen. Of the Russian classics, Zinoviev particularly singled out Lermontov, knew by heart many of his poems; from modern authors – Mayakovsky. The most understandable and closest foreign writer was Hamsun ("Hunger"). As noted by the biographer Pavel Fokin, Zinoviev was attracted by the loneliness and pride of individualistic characters, which contributed to the formation of a sense of his own exclusiveness. He began to consciously cultivate this position of extreme individualism, although later he always denied it, calling himself "the ideal collectivist".

As biographers noted, in his youth, Zinoviev was seized with the desire to "build a new world" and faith in a "bright future", he was fascinated by dreams of social justice, the ideas of equality and collectivism, material asceticism; his idols were Spartacus, Robespierre, Decembrists and Populists. As Konstantin Krylov wrote, the ideas corresponded to his personal experience: Zinoviev recalled that "he was a beggar among beggars", emphasizing that the communist utopia was the idea of beggars. On the one hand, the social, cultural and economic changes that occurred in the 1930s contributed to optimism; on the other hand, Alexander noticed an increasing inequality, saw how families of party and state officials live; drew attention to the fact that in the advancement of the social scale the most successful were activists, demagogues, talkers and scammers; observed the discrimination of the peasants in comparison with the working class, the degradation of the village and the formation of the new "serfdom" of the collective farms, which he witnessed when he came on holidays in Pakhtino. Impressed by the famous book of Radishchev, he wanted to write an accusatory "Journey from Chukhloma to Moscow"; in 1935, after the promulgation of the draft Stalin constitution, he jokingly made up a fictional constitution in which "idlers and stupids" had "the right to the same marks as the honors pupils" (the story caused a school scandal, but the matter was hushed up). As Pavel Fokin writes, "the exploits and meanness" of Soviet society, the contradictions and problems of everyday life provoked a "spiritual rebellion". According to the interpretation of Konstantin Krylov, disappointment in the practical implementation of the ideals of communism did not encourage young Zinoviev to deny the very idea of communism, or to search for other ideals. He chose the third way, concluding that evil is inevitably inherent in the social world, and that this world is essentially evil. This position later influenced his sociology.

In the Komsomol, Zinoviev was a member of the school committee, and was responsible for the publication of a satirical newspaper. The choice of philosophy as a future specialty was influenced by a teacher of social sciences, a graduate student of the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature, and History [hy; pl; ru; uk] – the main humanitarian university of those years in the Soviet Union. Together with his teacher, Alexander began to study the works of Marx and Engels, and was fascinated by dialectics. After graduating from school in 1939 with honors, he entered the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History (other options were math and architecture). Among his fellow students were later well-known philosophers Arseny Gulyga, Igor Narsky, Dmitry Gorsky and Pavel Kopnin. The atmosphere at the institute, the forge of the "fighters of the ideological front", was heavy. Zinoviev was almost without funds, the meager scholarship was not enough, his father stopped helping him. As Pavel Fokin writes, Zinoviev was in a state of physical and nervous exhaustion. In search of an answer to the question of why the bright ideals of communism proclaimed were at variance with reality, Zinoviev thought about the figure of Stalin: "The Father of Nations" became the cause of the perversion of communist ideals.