It is claimed that the freedom index in the region had seen an improvement after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953 and the emergence of Nikita Khrushchev as the new general secretary of the CPSU. Soon, life in Armenia's SSR began to see rapid improvement. The church, which was limited during the secretaryship of Stalin, was revived when Catholicos Vazgen I assumed the duties of his office in 1955. In 1967, a memorial to the victims of the Armenian genocide was built at the Tsitsernakaberd hill above the Hrazdan gorge in Yerevan. This occurred after mass demonstrations took place on the tragic event's fiftieth anniversary in 1965.