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
Turks in the former Soviet Union Turks in the former Soviet Union Turks in the former Soviet Union were a relatively small minority within the Soviet Union. However, their presence is considered important within Turkology due to the deportation of thousands of Turks from their home countries. Under the Ottoman Empire, Samtskhe-Javakheti was heavily Islamised producing a Turkish ethnicity within the southwestern region of Georgia. In November 1944, up to 120,000 of these Turks were deported to Central Asia under the rule of Joseph Stalin. Turks in the former Soviet Union have a long history beginning in the Ottoman Empire when the Turks began to migrate