Ioosep Maksimovich Saat

(in Estonian, Joosep Saat). Born July 17 (30), 1900, on the island of Muhu, now Kingissepp Raion, Estonian SSR. Soviet historian. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Estonian SSR (1951). Member of the Communist Party of Estonia since 1921.

During the years of the bourgeois regime in Estonia, Saat was a schoolteacher, telegraph operator, and member of the editorial staff of workers’ newspapers. He also carried on underground party work. He was sentenced to hard labor for life and remained in prison from 1924 to 1938. Saat participated in the establishment of Soviet power in Estonia (1940). In 1947 he completed a course at the Higher Party School in Moscow. From 1949 to 1956 he was director of the institute of party history of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Estonia, and from 1956 to 1968 he was academician-secretary of the division of social sciences of the Academy of Sciences of the Estonian SSR. In 1968 he became a senior research worker at the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the Estonian SSR. From 1941 to 1962 Saat was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Estonia.

Saat’s principal works deal with the history of the October Revolution of 1917 and the labor movement in Estonia. He is coauthor of the three-volume History of the Estonian SSR. Saat has been awarded the State Prize of the Estonian SSR (1970), the Order of Lenin, the Order of the October Revolution, three other orders, and various medals.