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
Transport in the Soviet Union to or air fleet, originally consisted of an amalgam of existing air transportation fleets in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. By creating Aeroflot, the Soviet government was, much like many industries in the young Soviet Union at the time, expanding and centralizing fleets like the "Red Air Fleet." To the general public, the aviation industry did not represent modernization; rather, it represented the means to achieve modernization and future glory. During Joseph Stalin's Second Five-Year Plan (1933-1938), the Communist Party Congress (and Stalin himself) devised the development and further expansion of the aviation industry, soon making air transport one