General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union more than determine party membership composition. Stalin, its first incumbent, used the principles of democratic centralism to transform his office into that of party leader, and later leader of the Soviet Union. In 1934, the 17th Party Congress refrained from formally re-electing Stalin as General Secretary. However, Stalin was re-elected into all other positions and remained leader of the party without diminishment. In the 1950s, Stalin increasingly withdrew from Secretariat business, leaving the supervision of the body to Georgy Malenkov, possibly to test him as a potential successor. In October 1952, at the 19th Party Congress, Stalin restructured the party's
Persecution of Christians in the Soviet Union or prosecuting law-breakers. The clergy were attacked as foreign spies and trials of bishops were conducted with their clergy as well as lay adherents who were reported as 'subversive terroristic gangs' that had been unmasked. Official propaganda at the time called for the banishment of the very concept of God from the Soviet Union. These persecutions were meant to assist the ultimate socialist goal of eliminating religion. From 1932 to 1937 Joseph Stalin declared the 'five-year plans of atheism' and the LMG was charged with completely eliminating all religious expression in the country. Many of these same methods and terror