Biography

Ignatov was born in the village Tishanskaya of Donskaya Oblast (now Volgograd Oblast) in a family of a Russian carpenter. Since 1915 he started working as a carpenter too. In 1917, after the October Revolution, he joined the Red Army, first as a soldier and then, through the 1920s, as an intelligence officer, operating in Donskaya Oblast and later in Middle Asia. After completing his secondary education in 1932-1934, he worked as a Communist Party representative at a factory in St. Petersburg. In 1938 he became the first Secretary of the Communist Party of Kuybyshev. He was demoted in 1940 for ordering to return one third of the collected crops to farmers, in order to motivate them in the collective agriculture. During World War II he was one of the leaders of the partisan movement in Oryol Oblast, where he was the first Secretary of the Communist Party between 1943 and 1949. During 1949-1952 he took the equivalent party position in Krasnodarsky Krai.

In October 1952, Ignatov became a Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, but after the death of Stalin in 1953 he was demoted and moved first to St. Petersburg, then to Voronezh, and later to Nizhny Novgorod. On 6 May 1957, the central Communist newspaper Pravda published an article where he proposed to reorganize the Soviet economy and generally supported the similar ideas of Nikita Khrushchev. During the next month, he was one of the most active defenders of Khrushchev during the well-organized attempt by Malenkov, Molotov and Kaganovich to demote him within the party. Khrushchev repaid for this by promoting Ignatov to the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, as early as in December 1957, bypassing the usually required candidate stage. Since 1957, Ignatov fervently tried to move up in the party system, exploiting the support of Khrushchev, but met a strong opposition of the rivals, such as Alexei Kirichenko and Frol Kozlov. Later, in the 1960s, when the popularity of Khrushchev started to decline, he switched the sides and started traveling around the Soviet Union and personally persuading local party leaders against Khrushchev. He hoped in this way to gain support of the incoming party leader, Leonid Brezhnev, but failed. In 1966, while visiting Chile, he fell ill with an unknown viral infection and died shortly afterwards.

Ignatov was awarded with the honorary title Hero of Socialist Labour, as well as with the Order of Lenin (three times), Order of the Red Banner of Labour and Order of the Patriotic War of the 1st degree. In recognition of his achievements before the Communist Party, he was buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis in the Red Square.

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