Short answers, pulled from the story.
Alexander Zinoviev was a Soviet philosopher, sociologist, and writer born on the 29th of October 1922 in the village of Pakhtino, Kostroma Governorate. He wrote nearly 40 books across sociology, social philosophy, mathematical logic, and political thought, and is best known for his satirical novel "Yawning Heights", published in Lausanne in 1976, which was translated into roughly two dozen languages.
Zinoviev was expelled in August 1978 after publishing novels that Soviet authorities deemed anti-Soviet, including "Yawning Heights" and "A Bright Future", the latter of which contained personal insults directed at General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev. The Politburo chose expulsion over criminal prosecution partly to avoid a psychiatric commitment that would worsen the international campaign against Soviet psychiatry. He was also stripped of his Soviet citizenship and all state awards, including the Order of the Red Star.
Zinoviev returned to Moscow on the 30th of June 1999, having lived in Munich from August 1978 to July 1999. He cited the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia as the decisive factor in his decision to return.
The Moscow Logic Circle was a philosophical group Zinoviev co-founded in 1952 with Boris Grushin, Merab Mamardashvili, and Georgy Shchedrovitsky. It sought an alternative to both Soviet dialectical logic and classical formal logic, developing what the members called a "genetically meaningful" logic. The group operated at the Institute of Philosophy against the backdrop of a cautious intellectual revival following Stalin's death.
"Yawning Heights" won the European Charles Weyonne Prize for essay. "A Bright Future" won the Medici Award for the best foreign book of the year in France. "Communism as Reality", a theoretical study of Soviet society, won the Alexis de Tocqueville Prize for Humanism.
Zinoviev began as a fierce anti-Stalinist who was expelled from his university in 1939 for publicly criticizing the personality cult of Stalin. In exile during the 1980s, he shifted toward defending the Soviet system against Western criticism and eventually argued that Stalinism arose from below rather than from Stalin himself. After returning to Russia in 1999, he praised Putin initially but by 2002 concluded that Putin had failed to use his historical opportunity, and by 2006 he stated that Russia as a sovereign state no longer meaningfully existed.