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
Joseph Stalin Soviet Union. A 2012 survey commissioned by the Carnegie Endowment found 38% of Armenians concurring that their county "will always have need of a leader like Stalin". In early 2010 a new monument to Stalin was erected in Zaporizhia, Ukraine; in December unknown persons cut off its head and in 2011 it was destroyed in an explosion. In a 2016 Kiev International Institute of Sociology poll, 38% of respondents had a negative attitude to Stalin, 26% a neutral one and 17% a positive (19% refused to answer). Joseph Stalin Joseph Stalin (born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili; 18 December 1878 –