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
Economy of the Soviet Union and 20% respectively in 1991. Agriculture was the predominant occupation in the Soviet Union before the massive industrialization under Joseph Stalin. The service sector was of low importance in the Soviet Union, with the majority of the labor force employed in the industrial sector. The labor force totaled 152.3 million people. Major industrial products included petroleum, steel, motor vehicles, aerospace, telecommunications, chemicals, electronics, food processing, lumber, mining and defense industry. Though its GDP crossed $1 trillion in the 1970s and $2 trillion in the 1980s, the effects of central planning were progressively distorted due to the rapid growth of the