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Pyotr Pospelov

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Pyotr Pospelov
Пётр Поспелов
Director of the Institute of Marxism–Leninism of the Central Committee
In office
25 January 1961 – May 1967
Preceded byGennady Obichkin
Succeeded byPyotr Fedoseyev
In office
7 July 1949 – July 1952
Preceded byVladimir Kruzhkov
Succeeded byGennady Obichkin
Editor-in-chief of Pravda
In office
1940–1949
Preceded byIvan Niktin
Succeeded byMikhail 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
Kuznetsovo, Korcheva Uyezd, Tver Governorate, Russian Empire
Died22 April 1979(1979-04-22) (aged 80)
Moscow, RSFSR, Soviet Union
NationalitySoviet
Political partyCommunist Party (1916–1979)

Pyotr Nikolayevich Pospelov (Russian: Пётр Никола́евич Поспе́лов; 20 June [O.S. 8 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]

Life and career

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Pospelov was born at Konakovo in 1898. He joined the Bolsheviks as a student, in 1916, and in 1917, he was secretary of the Tver textile workers' union. During 1918–19, he worked for the Bolshevik underground in Chelyabinsk, which was then controlled by the White Army.[2] He was based in Tver again, in 1920, until 1924, when he was transferred to the Agitprop department of the Central Committee. The party machine was then already controlled by Joseph Stalin, whom Pospelov loyally supported until Stalin's death in 1953. In 1926–30, he studied at the Communist Academy in Moscow, and then in the Economics Department of the Institute of Red Professors in 1930.[2] In 1930–39, he was a member of the Central Control Commission and its successor, the Party Control Commission.

Pospelov 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.[3]

Early in the Great Purge, on 13 March, 1937, just after two of Lenin's former closest comrades, Nikolai Bukharin and Alexei Rykov had been arrested, Pravda gave prominence to an article signed by Pospelov, headed 'The Struggle of Bukharin and Rykov against Lenin and the party', accusing them of criminal links with Leon Trotsky[4]

In 1937–40, he was appointed deputy head of Agitprop, which was headed by Andrei Zhdanov. He was a member of the Central Committee, 1939–1971. In September 1940, he was appointed chief editor of Pravda, but was sacked in August 1949, and replaced by Mikhail Suslov, at a time when dozens of officials who had been linked to Zhdanov were losing their jobs in a purge carried out by Zhdanov's former rival, Georgy Malenkov.[5] He held the lesser post of Director of the Marx–Engels–Lenin–Stalin Institute, in 1949–52. Early in 1953, he was reinstated as deputy chief editor of Pravda.

On 6 March, 1953, just after the death of Stalin, Pospelov was appointed a Secretary of the Central Committee. In the power struggles of the early 1950s, he backed Nikita Khrushchev against Malenkov.

Pospelov was reputedly so upset when Stalin died that he started sobbing, until the police chief, Lavrentiy Beria shook him, exclaiming "What's the matter with you? Cut it out!,"[6] while also he playing a prominent role in the dismantling of Stalin's reputation. Speaking to the USSR Academy of Sciences on 19 October, 1953, Pospelov was one of the first to publicly attack the 'Cult of the Personality'.[7]

Khrushchev revealed in his memoirs that in 1954, Pospelov was put in charge of what became known as the "Pospelov commission" which investigated cases of loyal party officials who had been the mass repressions in the Soviet Union, and that he wrote the speech, On the Personality Cult and its Consequences, which Khrushchev delivered during a closed session of the 20th Party Congress, in 1956. Khrushchev claimed that he had even proposed that Pospelov should deliver it, but was talked into delivering it himself.[8][9] During the 21st Party Congress, in February, 1959, Pospelov delivered a speech in which he denounced Malenkov and his allies as a "wretched group of bankrupts, splitters and fractionists."[10]

Pospelov lost his position as a secretary of the Central Committee in May 1960, at a time when hardliners such as Suslov had forced Khrushchev to take a harder line against the west, in the wake of the shooting down of the U2 pilot, Gary Powers. In 1961–67, Pospelov returned to his former role as Director of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

Despite his part in the process of de-Stalinisation, 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.[11]

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

Awards

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References

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  1. ^ Pospelov's biography Archived 2009-04-30 at the Wayback Machine at khronos.ru (in Russian)
  2. ^ a b Zalessky, K.A. "Поспелов, Петр Николаевич 1898-1979 биографический указатель". Khronos. Retrieved 13 July 2022.
  3. ^ 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.
  4. ^ Conquest, Robert (1971). The Great Terror, Stalin's Purge of the Thirties. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin. p. 273.
  5. ^ Hahn, Werner G. (1982). Postwar Soviet Politics, The Fall of Zhdanov and the Defeat of Moderation, 1946-53. Ithaca: Cornell U.P. pp. 111–12.
  6. ^ Taubman, William (2005). Khrushchev. London: Simon & Schuster. p. 278. ISBN 0-7432-7564-0.
  7. ^ Conquest, Robert (1961). Power and Policy in the U.S.S.R. London: MacMillan. p. 276.
  8. ^ Khrushchev, Nikita (1971). Khrushchev Remembers. London: Sphere. pp. 311–16.
  9. ^ 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
  10. ^ Conquest. Power and Policy in the U.S.S.R. p. 378.
  11. ^ 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.
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