Anna Pankratova

Anna Mikhailovna Pankratova (, 16 February 1897 – 25 May 1957) was a leading Soviet historian, educator and member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union. A widely published author, she was editor in chief of the influential Russian historical journal Voprosy Istorii and headed the National Committee of USSR Historians. A member of the Communist Party, she became an elected member of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet.

Biography Early life and education Pankratova was born in Odessa, Odessa uezd. Her father, a soldier, died when she was nine. Her mother worked as a laborer. Despite growing up in poverty, she completed school and graduated in history from the Imperial Novorossiya University in 1917.

In her teens, Pankratova joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party, and when the party split in 1917, joined the Left SRs, who supported the October Revolution, and worked for them underground in Odessa during the civil war. She switched to the Bolsheviks in 1919.

At the Institute, Pankratova met and married a fellow student, Grigory Yakovin, whom the writer Victor Serge described as "a sporting enthusiast with a constantly alert intelligence, good looks, and a spontaneous charm". They had a daughter, Maya, born in 1925, the year they both graduated. They traveled abroad together on a scientific mission in Germany and France. In 1927, she ended her marriage and denounced her husband as a supporter of the left opposition, led by Leon Trotsky. He was expelled from the communist party and arrested. She visited Yakovin in prison in Tashkent, in 1929, in the hope of persuading to renounce the opposition, but he refused. But she radically changed her mind after Joseph Stalin had ruled that Pokrovsky had been wrong in believing that the Russian Empire was a "prison of nations", in which the non-Russian minorities were enslaved, and that he had failed to understand how great leaders such as Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great changed history. In 1939, she wrote that:

Pankratova joined the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union's Institute of History in 1939. In World War II, she was evacuated with a number of other eminent historians to Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan. In 1942, they published a collection of essays, Twenty Five Years of Historical Scholarship in the USSR, which she edited, which again comprehensively renounced Pokrovsky's view of history.

Under her leadership, they also wrote The History of the Kazakh SSR. Published in 1949, the work was the first of its kind, describing the history of a Soviet Republic from its origins to the start of the Second World War. Edited by Pankratova, it inspired further research into the history of pre-Soviet and Soviet peoples. From 1953 to 1957, Pankratova was the editor of the Soviet historical journal Voprosy istorii.

Publications The histories written by Pankratova document in particular the development of the Russian workers' movement and of Soviet society in general.

Awards Pankratova's awards include the Stalin Prize (1946), Order of Lenin, and two Orders of the Red Banner of Labour.