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
Predictions of the dissolution of the Soviet Union Predictions of the dissolution of the Soviet Union There were people and organizations who predicted that the USSR would fall before the eventual dissolution of the USSR in 1991. Authors often credited with having predicted the dissolution of the Soviet Union include Andrei Amalrik in "Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?" (1970), French academic Emmanuel Todd in "La chute finale: Essais sur la décomposition de la sphère Soviétique (The Final Fall: An essay on the decomposition of the Soviet sphere)" (1976), economist Ravi Batra in his 1978 book "The Downfall of Capitalism and Communism" and French historian Hélène Carrère