Word: commissar
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...time was spent in enforced and irritating idleness. He was always admired but always a little suspect, and could not move from band to band without permission. He quickly discovered that the real power in each group lay not with the military leader but with the political commissar. Once, when Chapman started a newspaper, the party members on the staff politely printed what he wrote, then burned the entire second issue and never printed another. That reduced Chapman's cultural contributions to yodeling and Eskimo songs, which always made a great...
...sheer indiscretion and moral decay would surprise even the FBI. Fashioned in the image of Hollywood gangsters, the hard core of the cell includes a couple of strong-arm goons who stand guard over the indoctrination classes, a party scout who looks like a prosperous bookie, and a bigtime commissar who welcomes nonparty members into the secret sessions of his local politburo...
...pipe, or a cigarette, or a cigar-whatever came to hand-grey-haired, paunchy and tentatively smiling, the graduate of Franklin High School moved into the darkness of top leadership. The ancient William Foster was made chairman-actually, a secondary job. Eugene Dennis, as general secretary, became the little commissar...
Like any good commissar, Dennis carried out Moscow's orders. But he was not too skillful as an executive officer and tactician. He tried, for example, to get Mike Quill, onetime devout party-liner, to throw the support of his C.I.O. Transport Workers Union behind Henry Wallace's presidential campaign. Quill refused. When...
...Panova's characters is the old party rank & filer, now a commissar with a bleak smile and cold eye, who finds himself bewildered because, though he knows he shouldn't be, he is unhappy. Another is an ugly, peevish, middle-aged nurse secretly in love with feeble Dr. Suprugov. The doctor himself, a weak, cunning, vain, lying, frightened creature, might have come out of Chekhov...