Ponomarev, Boris Nikolaevich

Born Jan. 4 (17), 1905, in Zaraisk, now in Moscow Oblast. Soviet statesman and party figure, historian. Hero of Socialist labor (1975). Professor (1932), academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1962; corresponding member, 1958). Member of the CPSU since 1919. Son of an office worker.

Ponomarev volunteered for the Red Army in 1919. From 1920 to 1923 he did Komsomol and party work in Zaraisk as secretary of the district committee and a member of the bureau of the Riazan’ provincial committee of the Komsomol and a secretary of a factory party organization. He graduated from Moscow State University in 1926 and the Institute of the Red Professors in 1932. From 1926 to 1928, Ponomarev did party work in the Donbas and Turkmenia. From 1932 to 1934 he was deputy director of the Institute of Party History of the Red Professors. From 1934 to 1936 he was the director of the Institute of Party History of the Moscow committee of the ACP (Bolshevik). From 1937 to 1943 he worked for the Executive Committee of the Comintern.

In 1943–44, Ponomarev was deputy director of the Institute of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. From 1944 to 1946 he was deputy chief of a department of the Central Committee of the ACP(B). From 1947 to 1949 he was deputy chief and chief of the Soviet Information Bureau of the Council of Ministers of the USSR. In 1948 he became first deputy chief of a department of the Central Committee, and from 1955 to 1961 a department chief of the Central Committee of the CPSU. In October 1961 he became a secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU.

At the Nineteenth Party Congress, Ponomarev was elected a candidate member of the Central Committee, and at the Twentieth and Twenty-second through Twenty-fifth Congresses, a member of the Central Committee of the CPSU. In May 1972 he became a candidate member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU. He was a deputy to the fifth through ninth convocations of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.

Ponomarev was the author and editor of many works on the history of the CPSU; the foreign policy of the USSR; the international communist, workers’, and national liberation movements; and the theory of scientific socialism. In 1932 he became head of the subdepartment of party history at the Institute of the Red Professors and then at the Academy of Social Sciences under the Central Committee of the CPSU. He directed a writers’ collective in composing a textbook on the history of the CPSU (1960; 4th ed., 1971–74). He was a member of the main editorial board of the multivolume history of the CPSU.

Ponomarev was a member of several delegations of the CPSU at the international Conferences of Communist and Workers’ Parties. He was awarded five Orders of Lenin, two other orders, and various medals.