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
Military history of the Soviet Union the territories populated mostly by ethnic Belarusians and Ukrainians. Next, Soviet Union sent ultimatums to the Baltic states and gained control in September and October. The Soviet Union had negotiated with the Finns for over a year, but they refused Soviet demands, and the Red Army assaulted on 30 November 1939 starting the Winter War. Simultaneously, a puppet regime, called the Finnish Democratic Republic, was set by the Soviets. The initial period of the resulting war proved disastrous for the Soviet military. As a direct result of the Soviet aggression the Soviet Union was expelled from the League of Nations