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
Censorship in the Soviet Union the war. Defeats of the Red Army in literature were forbidden, as were depictions of trepidation in Soviet military characters. Pressure from the "Pravda" prompted authors like Alexander Alexandrovich Fadeyev to redact a section in "The Young Guard" where a child reads in the eyes of a dying Russian sailor the words "We are crushed." Since Stalin regularly read "Pravda", which was itself censored by Glavlit, it was wise for an author to obey "Pravda"’s advice. Also, Joseph Stalin handpicked who received the Stalin Prize, further incentivizing an author’s pandering to Stalin’s tastes, besides the obvious risks involved with disregarding