[3] In March 1938, Ignatov replaced Postyshev – who was arrested and shot – as first party secretary in Kuybyshev, and in March 1939, he was elected to the Central Committee, but at the 18th party conference of the CPSU in February 1941, he was singled out by Georgy Malenkov – Zhdanov's rival – for his failure to increase agricultural output in Kuybyshev, after he had ordered the return one third of the collected crops to farmers, to motivate them in the collective agriculture.

[2] In July 1944, he was appointed First Secretary of the Oryol Communist Party, but lost this post in November 1948, soon after the death of his patron, Zhdanov.

On 6 May 1957, the central Communist newspaper Pravda published an article where he proposed to reorganize the Soviet economy and generally supported the similar ideas of Nikita Khrushchev.

Khrushchev repaid for this by promoting Ignatov to the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, as early as in December 1957, bypassing the usually required candidate stage, and reappointing him a Secretary of the Central Committee.

[5] With his background as former OGPU officer, Ignatov apparently formed an alliance with the head of the KGB, Ivan Serov, arousing the suspicion of Khrushchev's second in command, Aleksey Kirichenko, the party secretary with oversight over the security services, who complained to the Presidium that "several times I looked for Serov and found him with Ignatov" – which was "incomprehensible.

"[2] In April 1959, soon after Serov had been sacked, Ignatov was transferred to the ceremonial position of chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of Russia, but seven months later, after Kirichenko had been abruptly sacked, he was reinstated as a Secretary of the Central Committee, only to be shifted in May 1960 to a lesser job of Deputy Chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers, responsible for agriculture, and subsequently removed from the Presidium.