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
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