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
Transport in the Soviet Union to or air fleet, originally consisted of an amalgam of existing air transportation fleets in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. By creating Aeroflot, the Soviet government was, much like many industries in the young Soviet Union at the time, expanding and centralizing fleets like the "Red Air Fleet." To the general public, the aviation industry did not represent modernization; rather, it represented the means to achieve modernization and future glory. During Joseph Stalin's Second Five-Year Plan (1933-1938), the Communist Party Congress (and Stalin himself) devised the development and further expansion of the aviation industry, soon making air transport one