Boris Nikolayevich Ponomarev (17 January 1905 – 21 December 1995) was a Soviet politician, ideologist, historian and member of the Secretariat of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. His patron in his rise to the Politburo was Mikhail Suslov. His name would more accurately be transliterated as "Ponomaryov," though the form "Ponomarev" has become more frequent.

Career

From 1955 to 1986, Ponomarev was chief of the International Department of the CPSU Central Committee. He occupied an office within Central Committee headquarters until the 1991 August coup, which he is said to have supported. In 1962, Ponomarev wrote an updated state history of the CPSU to replace Stalin's 1938 History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) as part of the Khrushchev Thaw. His December 1962 speech at the All-Union Conference of Historians was a major turning point in the development of Soviet historiography.

Publications