Word: commissar
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Maxim Litvinov, longtime Soviet Foreign Commissar and Ambassador to the U.S., was "released from his duties" as Deputy Foreign Minister. Into his shoes stepped the former Soviet Ambassadors to Britain and Japan, Fedor Gusev and Yakov Malik...
Nagy's chief co-delegate was Vice Premier Matyas Rakosi, a poised, sharp-tongued, veteran Communist who got his start as People's Commissar under Bela Kun's terror regime and spent years in Hungary's jails. In 1939, well aware of his importance to Hungary's future...
When the news of Italy's surrender finally comes, San Fernando celebrates. Farkas' Italian friend is in fact a Communist, and sets up shop as the local commissar. Rumors fly fast: Mussolini has killed himself; Hitler has taken poison; the British will arrive any minute, accompanied by the Chief Rabbi of London and the entire Navy. San Fernando strings up a few Fascists, hangs out homemade Allied flags, dances in the streets...
Time was when Soviet leaders, like many a Western liberal, considered lotteries just another device for exploiting the masses. In 1923, the U.S.S.R. banned them. In 1930, it permitted them again, if the People's Commissar for Finance found the purpose worthy. During World War II, lottery loans ran up to 2,200,000,000 rubles; they paid off in cash and also in kind, including women's shoes, silk dresses and a Persian lamb coat...
...Mexico, in 1940, assassins had orders to lay a living ghost. He was Leon Davidovich Trotsky (real name Bronstein), organizer of the Bolshevik coup d'etat which overthrew Russia's democratic Provisional Government (1917), once Soviet Commissar of Foreign Affairs, Soviet Commissar of War, organizer and leader of the Red Army against the anti-Communist and Allied forces, and-after his expulsion from the Communist Party by Joseph Stalin-the world's No. 1 political D.P. From the safety of democratic countries (Norway, France, Mexico) which he longed to communize, this ubiquitous, political ghost had haunted Stalin...