who served during the 1980s as general secretary of the soviet communist party and as president
List of leaders of the Soviet Union Under the 1977 Constitution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the Chairman of the Council of Ministers was the head of government[1] and the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet was the head of state.[2] The office of the Chairman of the Council of Ministers was comparable to a prime minister in the First World,[1] whereas the office of the Chairman of the Presidium was comparable to a president in the First World.[2] In the Soviet Union's seventy-year history there was no official leader of the Soviet Union office, but during most of that era there was a de facto top leader who usually led the country through the office of the Premier or the office of the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). In the ideology of Vladimir Lenin the head of the Soviet state was a collegiate body of the vanguard party (see What Is to Be Done?).
Soviet Union The Soviet Union,[8] officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics[9] (USSR, Russian: СССР), was a socialist state in Eurasia that existed from 1922 to 1991. Nominally a union of multiple equal national Soviet republics,[a] its government and economy were highly centralized. The country was a one-party state, governed by the Communist Party with Moscow as its capital in its largest republic, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. The Russian nation had constitutionally equal status among the many nations of the union but exerted de facto dominance in various respects.[10] Other major urban centres were Leningrad, Kiev, Minsk, Alma-Ata and Novosibirsk. The Soviet Union was one of the five recognized nuclear weapons states and possessed the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction.[11] It was a founding permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, as well as a member of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and the leading member of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) and the Warsaw Pact.