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
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