Anna Mikhailovna Pankratova

Born Feb. 4 (16), 1897, in Odessa; died May 25,1957, in Moscow. Soviet historian. Party and public figure. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1953). Member of the Academy of Sciences of the Byelorussian SSR (1940) and the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the RSFSR (1944). Member of the Communist Party (1919).

From a family of workers, Pankratova graduated from the department of history at the University of Odessa (Novorossiia University) in 1917. During the Civil War of 1918–20 she took part in the partisan movement in Odessa Province. In 1920 and 1921 she worked for the party in the Ukraine and the Urals. She graduated from the Institute of the Red Professors in 1925 and from 1926 to 1930 taught at the N. K. Krupskaia Academy of Communist Education, the la. M. Sverdlov Communist Higher Educational Institution, the military political academy in Leningrad, Moscow and Saratov universities, the Lenin Moscow Pedagogical Institute, and the Academy of Social Sciences under the CPSU Central Committee. In 1939 she joined the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, and from 1953 to 1957 she was editor in chief of the journal Voprosy istorii.

Pankratova studied the history of the Russian workers’ movement, the history of Soviet society, and the history of the Western European proletariat. Her works include The Factory Committees of Russia in the Struggle for the Socialist Factory (1923), Factory Committees and Trade Unions: Russia, Germany, Italy, and France (1924), The St. Petersburg “Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class” (1939), and The Formation of the Proletariat in Russia: XVII-XVIII Centuries (1963). She contributed to the publication of the History of Diplomacy (State Prize of the USSR, 1946) and was editor in chief and coauthor of a secondary-school textbook on the history of the USSR.

Pankratova represented Soviet historiography at international congresses of historians in Warsaw (1933–34), Budapest (1953), and Rome (1955). She headed the National Committee of Historians of the USSR from 1955 to 1957 and was chairman of the USSR branch of the Association for Cooperation With the United Nations. She was a corresponding member of the German and Rumanian academies of science and an honorary member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. At the Nineteenth and Twentieth Congresses of the CPSU, Pankratova was elected a member of the Central Committee. She was a deputy to the fourth convocation of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and a member of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. She was awarded the Order of Lenin, two other orders, and several medals.