Word: commissar
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...this, if so minded. Although functioning in part as a kind of auditor general's department, the Ministry of State Control means what it says: through it the organs of government are controlled, i.e., policed, and it has power to bring charges against any state employee, be he commissar or clerk. Stalin held the office years ago and used it (together with the Party Control Commission which does a corresponding job within the party apparatus) to win absolute power. Most distinguished of recent State Control Ministers: Vsevolod Merkulov, a Beria man, executed along with Beria...
Died. Eliena Krylenko Eastman, 61, Polish-born Russian landscape painter, muralist and onetime (1921) secretary to Maxim Litvinoff (then Vice Commissar of Soviet Foreign Affairs), sister of Nikolai Krylenko, onetime Soviet chief prosecutor who was purged in 1938, and wife of oldtime socialist Max (Reflections on the Failure of Socialism) Eastman; of cancer; in Gay Head, Mass...
Once, so the story goes, a Soviet commissar visited Violinist David Oistrakh in Odessa, looked into a cradle and sternly ordered, "Make that boy as good a violinist as his father." For a while it looked as if nothing like that could ever happen. David Oistrakh was already on his way to being one of the world's finest fiddlers, and young Igor showed signs of detesting violin sounds from the time he started making them at the age of six. But they kept his bow to the catgut. At 18 he entered the Moscow conservatory, became a master...
...anti-Semitism was also a reminder of Khrushchev's work in the Ukraine. As the Central Committee began rehabilitating liquidated Red army officers, Nikita's chosen partner Bulganin suffered a severe loss of prestige. Marshal Zhukov, who had been downgraded (and all but liquidated) by top military commissar Bulganin at the high point of his great wartime victories, had an old score to settle...
...Zhukov's apparently enlarging role in Central Committee affairs, it must also be remembered that (according to Marshal Alexander Vasilevsky), 86.4% of all Red army officers are also party members. Although most of the nine men mentioned by Voprosi Istorii were associated with Trotsky when he was War Commissar, their rehabilitation has been carried out without any mention of Trotsky, or of the charges of Trotskyite collaboration made against them by Stalin...