Joseph Stalin - followed by:- Georgy Malenkov Nikita Khrushchev Leonid Brezhnev Yuri Andropov Konstantin Chernenko Mikhail Gorbachev Vladimir Ivashko It is disputable whether any of them was an...
First Soviet Satellite .
It was called the 'Sputnik' and was put into orbit in October 1957. The timing was 'tweaked' to mark the 40th anniversary of the Russian Revolution of 1917.