Marshal of the Soviet Union in 1947 by politician Nikolai Bulganin. Two Marshals were executed in postwar purges: Kulik in 1950 and Beria in 1953, following Stalin's death. Thereafter the rank was awarded only to professional soldiers, with the exception of Leonid Brezhnev, who made himself a Marshal in 1976, and Ustinov, who was prominent in the arms industry and was appointed Defence Minister in July 1976. The last Marshal of the Soviet Union was Dmitry Yazov, appointed in 1990, who was imprisoned after the failed coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991. Marshal Sergei Akhromeev committed suicide in 1991 during the fall of the Soviet
International Association of Friends of the Soviet Union November of the same year by the Gheorghe Tătărescu cabinet, and was succeeded by the Society for Maintaining Cultural Links between Romania and the Soviet Union, created in May 1935 and itself outlawed in 1938. Various attempts to build on the "Amicii URSS" legacy during World War II remained unsuccessful, but after the start of Soviet occupation, in November 1944, the Romanian Society for Friendship with the Soviet Union (ARLUS) was founded. It survived as an officially-endorsed cultural institution during the early stages of the Communist regime, but was disbanded in 1964, when the Romanian Communist leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej announced