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
Premier of the Soviet Union Council of People's Commissars published decrees and decisions that were binding throughout the USSR. During 1946, the Council of People's Commissars was transformed into the Council of Ministers (Sovmin) at both all-Union and Union Republic levels. After Khrushchev's ouster during 1964, a plenum of the Party's Central Committee (CC) forbade any single person to have the two most powerful jobs of the country (the office of the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Premier) and Kosygin was in charge of economic administration in his role as Premier of the Council of Ministers of the