History of the Soviet Union (1953–64) Nikita Khrushchev as First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and Georgi Malenkov as Premier of the Soviet Union. However the central figure in the immediate post-Stalin period was the former head of the state security apparatus, Lavrentiy Beria. Stalin had left the Soviet Union in an unenviable state when he died. At least 2.5 million people languished in prison and in labor camps, science and the arts had been subjugated to socialist realism, and agriculture productivity on the whole was meager. The country had only one quarter of the livestock it
Stalin and His Hangmen Stalin and His Hangmen Stalin and His Hangmen: An Authoritative Portrait of a Tyrant and Those Who Served Him by Donald Rayfield, and the imprinted with another subtitle: Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him, is a 2004 political biography by Donald Rayfield, of Joseph Stalin and his subordinates who ran the Soviet secret police: Felix Dzerzhinsky, Vyacheslav Menzhinsky, Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolai Yezhov and Lavrentiy Beria. The books are based on recent publication by Russian authors of material from Soviet archives that started to open after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and from some