Pyotr Pospelov

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(1979-04-22) (aged 80) Moscow, Russia
Nationality	Soviet
Political party	Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Pyotr Nikolayevich Pospelov (Russian: Пётр Николаевич Поспелов) (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.

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 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.

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

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