A widely published author, she was editor in chief of the influential Russian historical journal Voprosy Istorii and headed the National Committee of USSR Historians.
[4] At the Institute, Pankratova met and married a fellow student, Grigory Yakovin, whom the writer Victor Serge described as "a sporting enthusiast with a constantly alert intelligence, good looks, and a spontaneous charm".
[3] In August 1936, after the first of the Moscow Show Trials, which marked the start of the Great Purge, Pankratova was expelled from the Communist Party and the Institute of Red Professors because of her past association with Yakovin and other Trotskyites.
Previously, Pankratova had considered herself to be a pupil of Mikhail Pokrovsky, the Soviet Union's leading historian, who was her teacher at the Institute of Red Professors.
"[6] But she radically changed her mind after Joseph Stalin had ruled that Pokrovsky had been wrong in believing that the Russian Empire was a "prison of nations", in which the non-Russian minorities were enslaved, and that he had failed to understand how great leaders such as Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great changed history.
In 1942, they published a collection of essays, Twenty Five Years of Historical Scholarship in the USSR, which she edited, which again comprehensively renounced Pokrovsky's view of history.
Published in 1949, the work was the first of its kind, describing the history of a Soviet Republic from its origins to the start of the Second World War.
[9] The histories written by Pankratova document in particular the development of the Russian workers' movement and of Soviet society in general.