Among the memorial plaques in the Kremlin wall on Red Square is one whose inscription in gold letters reads: "Mikhail Nikolaevich Pokrovsky: August 29, 1868 - April 10, 1932." Between these two dates lay sixty-four years of a life filled with revolutionary struggle and indefatigable toil as a scholar - the glorious life of an eminent Marxist historian, a Bolshevik and Leninist, one of the leading builders of the new socialist school.