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
Excess mortality in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin persons in the famine of 1932–33 are sometimes, but not always, included with the victims of the Stalin era. According to official Soviet estimates, more than 14 million people passed through the "Gulag" from 1929 to 1953, with a further 7 to 8 million being deported and exiled to remote areas of the Soviet Union (including entire nationalities in several cases). According to a 1993 study of archival Soviet data, a total of 1,053,829 people died in the Gulag(not including labor colonies) from 1934 to 1953 (there was no archival data for the period 1919–1934). More recent archival figures for