Word: commissar
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Time was when Russia's light-fingered lady discus thrower, Nina Ponomaryeva, could lift a couple of hats from a London department store (TIME, Sept. 10, 1956) and rate hardly a slap on the wrist from her commissar chaperons. Nina was needed for the Olympics. But the party line has changed. Last week Czechoslovakia's table-tennis champion, Ivan Andreadis, was "temporarily disqualified" from the national team for "unsporting behavior." His bourgeois crime: Ivan "forgot" to report a large hunk of his earnings...
...carried his political housewifery into the army. The Red army newspaper published word that* Colonel General F. I. Golikov, 57, a World War II commander (Stalingrad, Kharkov) who served most recently as chief of Moscow's Armored Forces Academy, had been named the army's chief ) political commissar. Golikov replaced Colonel General Alexei Zheltov, a political general who held the post when Marshal Zhukov was dismissed as army chief last summer on charges of interfering with the ideological training of officers. (Zheltov is remembered as the Soviet deputy high commissioner in occupied Austria who remarked of his soldiers...
Last week the tension between writer and commissar stretched even tighter. The party decided to turn the independent-minded daily Sztandar Mlodych (Standard of Youth) into a house organ for the Communists' discredited Union of Socialist Youth Association. Then Stalinist Author Leon Kruczkowski, chairman of the party's Cultural Commission, bluntly warned the press that censorship will become an even stronger "weapon of cultural policy...
...twelve months, Nikita Khrushchev, peasant's son and cornfield commissar scorned by the party's veteran intellectuals, disposed of all his serious rivals?at least for the time. For good measure, he turned on the Soviet Union's No. 1 soldier and war hero, Marshal Georgy Zhukov, dismissed him with an airy promise of "some job for which he is experienced and qualified." He reorganized Soviet industry, laid down the law to Soviet intellectuals, stemmed the tide of desertions from the Western Communist parties, soothed the incipient rebellion in the satellites, and got from China's Mao Tse-tung...
...World War II, Malinovsky commanded the armies that drove the Germans from his native Ukraine, where his friend Nikita Khrushchev was political commissar. In 1945 he was transferred to the Far Eastern front, directed Soviet forces in the brief war against the Japanese in Manchuria, told Chinese Communists that if the U.S. "put out a hand" to interfere with them, "we will cut it off." Staying on as Soviet commander in the Far East, he presumably masterminded the Korean invasion of 1950, moved back to Moscow last year. For Khrushchev he will be a faithful servant rather than rival...