Josef Stalin (December 18 1878 – March 5, 1953),
He was General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's
Central Committee from 1922 until his death in 1953.

Nikita Khrushchyov (April 17, 1894 –September 11, 1971),
He was General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee
from 1953 until he was removed from power by his party colleagues in 1964.

Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev (December 19, 1906 – November 10, 1982).
General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from
October 14, 1964 until his deadth November 10, 1982.

Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov (June 15 1914 – February 9, 1984)
Was a Soviet politician and General Secretary of the CPSU from November 12,
1982 until his death just fifteen months later in February 9, 1984.

Mikhail Sergejevitj Gorbatjov (born 2 March 1931)
He was the last General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,
serving from 1985 until 1991, and also the last head of state of the USSR,
serving from 1988 until its collapse in 1991. He was the only Soviet leader to
have been born after the October Revolution of 1917.

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov Lenin (April 22, 1870 – January 21, 1924).
He was Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars
from 1917 until his death in 1924.

Georgy Maximilianovich Malenkov (December 26, 1902 – January 14, 1988).
He was Premier of the Soviet Union from 1953 until he was forced to resign in 1955.

Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria (29 March 1899–23 December 1953).
He was First Deputy Prime Minister from 1941until he was executed,
on the orders of Nikita Khrushchev, in 1953.

Andrei Aleksandrovich Zhdanov (February 26 1896–August 31, 1948).
Stalin had talked of Zhdanov being his successor but Zhdanov's
ill health gave his rivals, Beria and Malenkov, an opportunity to
undermine him. He died in 1948 in Moscow of a "heart failure".

Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov (March 9, 1890 – November 8, 1986)
He wasChairman of the Council of People's Commissars from 1930
until 1941 where Stalin assumed this office too.
He also was People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs from 1939 until he was
removed from office in 1949, by Georgii Malenkov and Nikita Khrushchev,
who where positioning them selves as the new favorite of Stalin.

Lev Borisovich Kamenev (July 18, 1883 – August 25, 1936).
During Lenin's illness, Kamenev was the acting Sovnarkom
and Politburo chairman. Together with Zinoviev and Joseph Stalin,
he formed a ruling 'triumvirate' (or 'troika') in the Communist Party.
Like Zinoviev he had a fall out with Stalin and was executed by firing squad on August 25, 1936.

Nikolai Alexandrovich Bulganin (June 11, 1895 – February 24, 1975)
He was Premier of the Soviet Union from 1955 until 1958.
Bulganin had come to share the doubts held about Khrushchev's
liberal policies by the conservative group (the so-called "Anti-Party Group")
led by Vyacheslav Molotov. In June, when the conservatives tried to remove
Khrushchev from power at a meeting of the Politburo, Bulganin vacillated
between the two camps. When the conservatives were defeated and removed
from power, Bulganin survived for a while, but in March 1958, at a session of the
Supreme Soviet, Khrushchev forced his resignation.

Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (September 29, 1898–November 20, 1976)
He was a biologist and agronomist who was dictator of Soviet biology under
Joseph Stalin. Lysenko rejected Mendelian genetics in favor of the hybridization
theories of Russian horticulturist Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin, and adopted them
into a powerful political scientific movement termed Lysenkoism.

Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin (October 9, 1888 – March 15, 1938)
Bukharin did not play a significant role in the Bolshevik seizure of power.
After the revolution, he became editor of Pravda.

After 1926, Bukharin, by then regarded as the leader of the Communist Party's
right wing, became an ally of the center of the party, which was led by Stalin and
which constituted the ruling group after Stalin broke his earlier alliance with
Kamenev and Zinoviev. It was Bukharin who detailed the thesis of "Socialism
in one country" put forth by Stalin in 1924, which argued that socialism
(in Leninist theory, the transitional stage from capitalism to communism)
could be developed in a single country, even one as underdeveloped as Russia.
This new theory stated that revolution need no longer be encouraged in the
capitalist countries, since Russia could and should achieve socialism alone.
The thesis would become a hallmark of Stalinism.

Bukharin was politically rehabilitated by Stalin and was made editor of Izvestia
in 1934, where he consistently highlighted the dangers of Fascist regimes
in Europe. He was arrested following a plenum of the Central Committee
in 1937 for conspiring to overthrow the Soviet state. He was tried in
March 1938 as part of the Trial of the Twenty One during the Great Purges,
and was executed by the NKVD, on March 15th 1938.