Pyotr Pospelov

Pyotr Nikolayevich Pospelov (Russian: Пётр Никола́евич Поспе́лов) (20 June 1898 – 22 April 1979) was a high-ranked functionary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ("Old Bolshevik", since 1916), propagandist, academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences (1953), chief editor of Pravda newspaper, and director of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism. He was known as a staunch Stalinist who quickly became a supporter of Nikita Khrushchev.[1]

Pyotr Pospelov Пётр Поспелов
Director of the Institute of Marxism–Leninism of the Central Committee
In office 25 January 1961 – May 1967
Preceded by	Gennady Obichkin
Succeeded by	Pyotr Fedoseyev
In office 7 July 1949 – July 1952
Preceded by	Vladimir Kruzhkov
Succeeded by	Gennady Obichkin
Editor-in-chief of Pravda
In office 1940–1949
Preceded by	Ivan Niktin
Succeeded by	Mikhail Suslov
Candidate member of the 20th–21st Presidium
In office 29 June 1957 – 17 October 1961
Member of the 19th, 20th–21st Secretariat
In office 5 March 1953 – 4 May 1960
Personal details
Born	Pyotr Nikolayevich Pospelov 20 June 1898 Konakovo, Russian Empire
Died	22 April 1979 (aged 80) Moscow, Soviet Union
Nationality	Soviet
Political party	Russian Communist Party (1916-1967)

Life and career

Pospelov was born at Konakovo in 1898. He graduated from the Economics Department of the Institute of Red Professors in 1930.[1] He was one of the principal authors of The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course, which served as a basic text on party history in the Stalinist period.[2]

He is also known as the head of the "Pospelov commission" on the investigation of the mass repressions in the Soviet Union, whose findings had laid the basis and the contents of Nikita Khrushchev's "secret speech" On the Personality Cult and its Consequences. [3]

In a 1969 article in the Kommunist, Pospelov praised Stalin as bulwark of party unity in the face of the "anti-Leninist" challenge of Trotskyism, writing that

It was only because the Leninist party and its Central Committee, headed by J. V. Stalin, were able ideologically and politically to defeat Trotskyism as an anti-Leninist current, it was only because the entire party rose to the defense of the Leninist doctrine, that the party unity was preserved, and that the split desired by the Trotskyites was prevented and the Communist Party led the Soviet people to the victory of socialism in our country.[4]

Pospelov died in Moscow in 1979 and was buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery.

Awards

• 6 Orders of Lenin
• Order of the October Revolution
• Order of the Patriotic War of 2nd degree
• Order of Friendship of Peoples
• Hero of Socialist Labor (1958)
• Stalin Prize (1943)

References

1. Pospelov's biography Archived 2009-04-30 at the Wayback Machine at khronos.ru (in Russian)
2. Banerji, Arup (2008). Writing History in the Soviet Union: Making the Past Work. New Delhi: Social Science Press. p. 145. ISBN 978-81-87358-37-4.
3. Michael Charlton (1992) "Footsteps from the Finland Station: Five Landmarks in the Collapse of Communism" ISBN 1-56000-019-8, Chapter 1: "Khrushchev's Secret Speech", pp. 7–80
4. Pospelov, Pyotr (1969). "Against Trotskyism". In Translations from Kommunist: No. 12, August 1969, pp. 54–72. Washington, D.C.: U. S. Joint Publications Research Service. Original in Kommunist No. 12 (August 1969), pp. 46–59.