Alexander Yakimovich Degtyaryov

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1946–2022 ○ Natural causes

Leningrad historian who was the last head of the CPSU Central Committee's Ideological Department

Born in 1946 in Tiksi in the Yakut ASSR, the son of a hydrographic ship captain, he grew up in Chukotka. He graduated from the history faculty of Leningrad University, joined the CPSU in 1970 and in 1981 earned a doctorate in history for research on rural settlement in medieval Russia. After serving as deputy secretary of the university party committee, he headed the science and education department of the Leningrad city party committee from 1982 and was a secretary of the Leningrad regional committee in 1986–1988. He became first deputy head of the CPSU Central Committee's Ideological Department in 1988 and its head in 1990–1991, and was elected to the Central Committee in July 1990. In the 1990s he worked at the Analytical Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences and in publishing; he died in 2022.