Vladimir Ilich Stepakov

Born May 31 (June 13), 1912, in Kaluga. Soviet party figure and diplomat. Doctor of historical sciences (1968). Member of the CPSU since 1937.

The son of an office worker, Stepakov worked as a metalworker and woodcutter in Kaluga and in Arkhangel’sk Oblast from 1927 to 1932. He graduated from the Higher Communist Agricultural School in Tula in 1935, the V. I. Lenin Moscow State Pedagogical Institute in 1952, and the Academy of Social Sciences attached to the Central Committee of the CPSU in 1957. He served in the Soviet Army from 1935 to 1937. From 1937 to 1940 he worked for the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry and the People’s Commissariat of Railroads. Between 1941 and 1944, Stepakov was in charge of a factory shop. From 1944 to 1952 he was engaged in party work in Moscow, and from 1957 to 1961 he was a department head, secretary, and second secretary of the Moscow City Committee of the CPSU. From 1961 to 1964 he worked for the Central Committee of the CPSU.

In 1964 and 1965, Stepakov was editor in chief of the newspaper Izvestiia. From 1965 to 1970 he was a department head of the Central Committee of the CPSU. In February 1971 he was appointed Soviet ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary to the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. From 1961 to 1966 he was a member of the Central Auditing Commission of the CPSU, and in 1966 he became a member of the party’s Central Committee. He was a deputy to the seventh convocation of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.

Stepakov has been awarded the Order of Lenin, two other orders, and various medals. He has written works on Marxist-Leninist education, including The Scientific Foundations of Party Propaganda (1967), and he supervised the team of writers who produced the book Foundations of Political Knowledge (1966).