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
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