Nikolai Grigorevich Ignatov

Born May 3 (16), 1901, in the stanitsa (large cossack village) of Tishanskaia, in present-day Nekhaevskii Raion, Volgograd Oblast; died Nov. 14, 1966, in Moscow. Soviet state and party figure. Hero of Socialist Labor (1961). Became a member of the CPSU in 1924. The son of a worker.

From 1917 to 1932, Ignatov was in the Red Army and worked for bodies of the Cheka and the Unified State Political Administration (OGPU); he participated in the struggle against the bands of Basmachi. After completing courses in Marxism-Leninism in 1934 under the Central Committee of the ACP (Bolshevik), he was engaged in party work. Between 1937 and 1940 he was second secretary and then first secretary of the Kuibyshev Oblast committee of the party; between 1941 and 1948 he was secretary and then first secretary of the Orel Oblast committee of the party. During the Great Patriotic War (1941–45), he was one of the leaders of the partisan movement of the Orel region. From 1949 on, he was first secretary of the Krasnodar Krai committee, second secretary of the Leningrad Oblast committee and first sceretary of the Leningrad city committee, first secretary of the Voronezh and Gorky oblast committees of the CPSU, and minister of state purchases of the USSR.

Ignatov was secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU in 1952–53 and 1957–60. From 1960 he was vice-chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR; he was simultaneously chairman of the State Committee on Purchases of the Council of Ministers of the USSR in 1961–62 and chairman of the Union Committee on Agriculture in 1962. From December 1962 he was chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR and from December 1963 vice-chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. In 1952–53 he was a candidate member of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the CPSU and from 1957 to 1961 a member of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the CPSU. In 1956–57 and from 1962 to 1966 he was a member of the Bureau of the Central Committee of the CPSU for the RSFSR. He was elected a member of the Central Committee of the CPSU at the Nineteenth through Twenty third Congresses of the party and was a deputy to the first through seventh convocations of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. He was awarded three Orders of Lenin, two other orders, and medals. Ignatov is buried in Red Square near the Kremlin wall.