Secretariat of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union the CPSU, who was also a Politburo member, was the leader of the Secretariat and of the Party. Dual membership in the Secretariat and the Politburo was in practice reserved for two or three very senior members of the Soviet leadership, and in the post-Stalin era (after March 1953) was a stepping-stone to ultimate power. The last five Soviet leaders (Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, Konstantin Chernenko and Mikhail Gorbachev) were all senior Secretaries before becoming First or General Secretaries. Additionally, Georgy Malenkov was briefly reckoned as the leader of the Party for a week after Stalin's death by
Ministries of the Soviet Union Ministries of the Soviet Union The Ministries of the Soviet Union () were the government ministries of the Soviet Union. After the Russian Revolution of 1917 the previous bureaucratic apparatus of bourgeois ministers was replaced by People’s Commissariats (; Narkom), staffed by new employees drawn from workers and peasants. On 15 March 1946 the people’s commissariats were transformed into ministries. The name change had no practical effects, other than restoring a designation previously considered a leftover of the bourgeois era. The collapse of the ministry system was one of the main causes behind the fall of the Soviet Union. State