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
Foreign trade of the Soviet Union Soviet Union formally requested observer status in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and in 1988 signed a normalization agreement with the European Economic Community. Structural changes in the foreign trade bureaucracy, granting direct trading rights to select enterprises, and legislation establishing joint ventures with foreigners opened up the economy to the Western technical and managerial expertise necessary to achieve the goals established by General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev's program of economic restructuring (perestroika). The government of the Soviet Union has always held a monopoly on all foreign trade activity, but only after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953