[1] The chairman of these bodies personally performed the largely ceremonial functions assigned to a single head of state[2] but was provided little real power by the constitution.
[7] In practice, the Chairman of the Presidium held little influence over policy ever since the delegation of the office's power to the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) during Joseph Stalin's rule.
[9] In connection with the dissolution of the Soviet Union national elections for the office of President never took place.
To be elected to the office a person must have been a Soviet citizen and older than thirty-five but younger than sixty-five years.
[12] Of the eleven individuals appointed head of state, three died in office of natural causes (Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko), one held the position in a temporary role (Vasily Kuznetsov), and four held posts of party leader and head of state simultaneously (Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko and Mikhail Gorbachev).
At over twenty years, Kalinin spent the longest time in office; he died shortly after his resignation in 1946.