Pyotr Pospelov


Pyotr Nikolayevich Pospelov was a high-ranked functionary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, propagandist, academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences, 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.

Life and career

Pospelov was born at Konakovo in 1898. He graduated from the Economics Department of the Institute of Red Professors in 1930. He was one of the principal authors of The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union : Short Course, which served as a basic text on party history in the Stalinist period.
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
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
Pospelov died in Moscow in 1979 and was buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery.

Awards