Afanasyev first became a professional instructor upon leaving the Soviet Army in 1953 and continued concentrate his professional interest on teaching and administrative appointments in academia into the 1960s and 1970s. His appointments during this period included teaching as an instructor in Soviet Marxist theory at the Chelyabninsk Pedogagical Institute and a position with the philosophical branch of the Academy of Social Sciences of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He authored a range of papers and books on philosophical subjects in the 1960s and 1970s. His dissertation for a Doktor nauk degree, a work concerned with issues pertinent to both philosophy and biology on a theoretical level, was accepted in 1964.
Afanasyev was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union in 1972 and advanced to become a full member in 1981.[2] He was elected to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1976.[2]
Afanasyev became deputy editor of Pravda (a newspaper given the prestige of serving as the "official voice of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union") in 1968. He remained as deputy editor with Pravda until joining the Kommunist (regarded as the theoretical and political organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union) for a brief period as chief editor in 1974-1975. He returned to become chief editor of Pravda in 1975, remaining with the newspaper in the same capacity until 1989.
Afanasyev was a Deputy (representative) of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, serving from 1974 to 1979. He was twice elected as a Deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, serving from 1979 to 1989.
As Pravda editor
Afansyev's period as editor of Pravda saw a lukewarm response to Mikhail Gorbachev's changes in the late 1980s, vacillating between support for Gorbachev's policies and for those of his opponents in the leading circles of the party, while Pravda's readership witnessed a precipitous decline, dropping by around half in the course of Gorbachev's first four years at the helm of the Soviet Union.[3]
A TIME story of October 1989 also recalled that Afanasyev "suffered a nasty embarrassment last month, when Pravda reprinted a lurid dispatch from an Italian newspaper claiming that reformist Supreme Soviet Deputy Boris Yeltsin boozed and shopped his way through a tour of the U.S."[3] The report noted that the newspaper was pressured into publishing an apology, although recorded video subsequently broadcast over the Soviet television "appeared to show Yeltsin at least mildly intoxicated."[3]
Afanasyev was dismissed in favor of Gorbachev ally Ivan Frolov under the guise of requesting a "transfer to scientific work" during the subsequent fallout.[3] He spent the remaining half-decade of his life absorbed in work for the Academy of Sciences of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (the Russian Academy of Sciences since 1991).
He died in Moscow in 1994 and was buried at the Kuntsevo Cemetery.[4]