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
Persecution of Christians in the Soviet Union or prosecuting law-breakers. The clergy were attacked as foreign spies and trials of bishops were conducted with their clergy as well as lay adherents who were reported as 'subversive terroristic gangs' that had been unmasked. Official propaganda at the time called for the banishment of the very concept of God from the Soviet Union. These persecutions were meant to assist the ultimate socialist goal of eliminating religion. From 1932 to 1937 Joseph Stalin declared the 'five-year plans of atheism' and the LMG was charged with completely eliminating all religious expression in the country. Many of these same methods and terror