After Soviet Union general secretary Joseph Stalin's death, several communist states have experimented with some sort of constitutional supervision. These organs were designed to safeguard the supreme power of the legislature. Romania was the first to experiment with constitutional supervision when it established a Constitutional Committee in 1965. It was elected by the legislature and leading jurists sat in the committee, but it was only empowered to advice the legislature. Keith Hand has commented that "t was not an effective institution in practice."