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
Government of the Soviet Union government acted as an interim government of the USSR. The generic term "Government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" can refer to the following organs of government of the USSR: Additionally, during the last period of the Soviet Union, the following interim bodies performed functions of the union government (management of the economy and performing economic and social reforms) after the Cabinet of Ministers was dissolved by a vote of no confidence: However eventually no new full government was formed due to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The term was also used by the government itself, the press