10 Facts About Pyotr Pospelov

Pyotr Pospelov was known as a staunch Stalinist who quickly became a supporter of Nikita Khrushchev.

Pyotr Pospelov joined the Bolsheviks as a student, in 1916, and in 1917, he was secretary of the Tver textile workers' union.

Pyotr Pospelov 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.

Pyotr Pospelov 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.

On 6 March, 1953, just after the death of Stalin, Pyotr Pospelov was appointed a Secretary of the Central Committee.

Khrushchev revealed in his memoirs that in 1954, Pyotr Pospelov was put in charge of what became known as the "Pyotr 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 Pyotr Pospelov should deliver it, but was talked into delivering it himself.

Pyotr 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.

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