Nikolay Ignatov

Nikolai Grigoryevich Ignatov (; – 14 November 1966) was a Soviet politician during the 1950s and 1960s After completing his secondary education in 1932–1934, he worked as a Communist Party representative at a factory in Leningrad. In 1937, he achieved rapid promotion, as a result of the Great Purge. Early in the year he was appointed first party secretary in one of the suburbs of Leningrad, where the regional party boss was Andrei Zhdanov.

In August 1937, Ignatov was appointed a secretary of the Communist Party of Kuybyshev – evidently with instructions to undermine the local party boss, Pavel Postyshev. When the Central Committee of the Soviet communist party (CPSU) held a plenary session in Moscow, in January 1938, Ignatov was allowed to attend and speak, although he was not a member, and launch a personal attack on Postyshev, who was a Central Committee member, and an alternate member of the Politburo. During an angry exchange, Postyshev accused Ignatov several times of lying. In March 1938, Ignatov replaced Postyshev – who was arrested and shot – as first party secretary in Kuybyshev, and in March 1939, he was elected to the Central Committee, but at the 18th party conference of the CPSU in February 1941, he was singled out by Georgy Malenkov – Zhdanov's rival – for his failure to increase agricultural output in Kuybyshev, after he had ordered the return one third of the collected crops to farmers, to motivate them in the collective agriculture. As an added humiliation, he was made to stand up so that everyone could see him while he was attacked. He was removed from his post in Kyubyshev, and from the Central Committee, and demoted to the post of head of a department of the regional communist party in Oryol Oblast.

During World War II, Ignatov organised partisan resistance in Oryol while the city was under German occupation.

With his background as former OGPU officer, Ignatov apparently formed an alliance with the head of the KGB, Ivan Serov, arousing the suspicion of Khrushchev's second in command, Aleksey Kirichenko, the party secretary with oversight over the security services, who complained to the Presidium that "several times I looked for Serov and found him with Ignatov" – which was "incomprehensible."