Background
The son of a high-ranking government official, Timofeev graduated from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations.
The son of a high-ranking government official, Timofeev graduated from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations.
Graduated from the Moscow Institute for Foreign Trade.
In the late 1960s and 70s, Timofeev worked as a journalist for Moscow magazines such as Novy Mir and Kommunist. Timofeev"s 1985 book The Technology of the Black Market or the Peasant Art of Starving was published in the West by Telos Press. The book presented a harsh condemnation of the Communist economic system.
Timofeev was arrested and sentenced to 11 years of hard labour on the grounds of "anti-Soviet propaganda".
He was freed in 1987 by a special decree signed by Mikhail Gorbachev. In the late 1980s, Timofeev published Referendum magazine and served as the chairman of the Moscow Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, a human rights watchdog.
Timofeev became one of the most vocal proponent of economic liberalization in Russia. In 1993 Timofeev ran for parliament on the Democratic Russia ticket.
He was appointed professor at the Russian State Humanitarian University, Timofeev was for many years director of the Center for Research on Extralegal Economic Systems and advised the government of Boris Yeltsin.
Timofeev was the leading theorist of drug decriminalization. In early 2000 Timofeev retired from politics and teaching and embarked on a career of novelist: since 2004 he published three novels and a collection of short stories. Lev Timofeev is the father of Anton Koslov Mayr, New York-based publisher of the Russian Riviera magazine, Sofia Timofeev, art historian and Ekaterina Timofeev, psychologist.
Religions convince people that the source of their misery lies in the inherent and unchangeable "sinfulness" of humanity rather than in the forms of social organization and institutions.
One day the Soviet Union will build a communist system with equal access of everybody to national wealth.
In the mid-1990s he joined the Transnational Radical Party and became a member of its General Council.