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
Rise of Joseph Stalin Stalin could now rather easily send Zinoviev and Kamenev to Gulag (thus far just briefly), and by 1929 also Bukharin, Tomsky and Rykov found themselves played by Stalin. All struggles for power was over. Stalin was now the autocratic ruler of the entire Soviet Union. Millions of Russians and people of other ethnic origin inside the Soviet Union had been killed during the Russian Civil War, through starvation and in other conflicts, but the bloodbath had thus far not reached within the Bolshevik Party. Not even by 1929 did Stalin think of having Trotsky or any other possible political opponent