Soviet historian and government official, one of the most representative Russian Marxist historians.

Pokrovsky joined the revolutionary movement as a young man, becoming a member of the Bolshevik Party in 1905. Forced to leave Russia following the revolutionary disturbances of 1905–07, he lived abroad from 1908 until 1917, when he returned to take part in the Bolshevik seizure of power in the October Revolution.

Pokrovsky was active in the campaign against Leon Trotsky in the early 1920s and subsequently held several positions in the government, the Communist Party, and various academic institutions, becoming a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1929. He was instrumental in setting up new Marxist scholarly institutes and in subordinating historical writing to the political needs of the new state. Despite his rigid Marxism, his ideas were denounced by Joseph Stalin as anti-Marxist, pseudoscientific, and injurious. He was posthumously rehabilitated at the 22nd congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1961.

In developing an orthodox Marxist interpretation of Russian history, Pokrovsky emphasized the socialist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat as the inevitable political consequences of class struggle and stressed the dialectical method in history. In the 1930s Stalinists attacked his “internationalist” insistence that the Russian Revolution was not necessarily the leading event in world revolution. His works include Russkaya istoriya s drevneyshikh vremyon (1911–12; “Russian History from the Earliest Times”) and Ocherk istorii russkoy kultury (1915–18; “An Outline History of Russian Culture”).