Nikolai Bulganin in the context of Minister of Defense (Soviet Union)

Joseph Stalin's cult of personality became a prominent feature of Soviet popular culture. Historian Archie Brown sets the celebration of Stalin's 50th birthday on 21 December 1929 as the starting point for his cult of personality. For the rest of Stalin's rule, the Soviet propaganda presented Stalin as an all-powerful, all-knowing leader, with Stalin's name and image displayed all over the country.

The Geneva Summit of 1955 was a Cold War-era meeting in Geneva, Switzerland. Held on July 18, 1955, it was a meeting of "The Big Four": President Dwight D. Eisenhower of the United States, Prime Minister Anthony Eden of Britain, Premier Nikolai A. Bulganin of the Soviet Union, and Prime Minister Edgar Faure of France. They were accompanied by the foreign ministers of the four powers (who were also members of the Council of Foreign Ministers): John Foster Dulles, Harold Macmillan, Vyacheslav Molotov, and Antoine Pinay. Also in attendance was Nikita Khrushchev, de facto leader of the Soviet Union.

This was the first such meeting since the Potsdam Conference ten years earlier.

The Ministry of Defense (Minoboron; Russian: Министерство обороны СССР) was a government ministry in the Soviet Union, which supervised the Soviet Armed Forces. The first Minister of Defense was Nikolai Bulganin, starting in 1953. Since March 15, 1946, the government institution has disbanded any mention of "people's commissars" returning to ministerial naming as before the Bolshevik coup-d'etat.