Word: commissar
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Under both Czar and commissar, Russia's aim in Eastern Europe since the Pan-Slavism of the mid-19th century has been to dilute nationalism and thereby exert its own will over an area that today contains 120 million inhabitants and represents the world's fourth largest industrial complex
...Commissar. In seeking an ogre in history, Historical Novelist Fast (Citizen Tom Paine) need have looked no further than the man in whose honor he was given the Stalin Peace Prize in 1953. But perhaps a contemporary fable would be too painful for Fast. He was an unswervingly militant card-carrying Communist and something of a culture commissar for Communism. Himself a Jew, he became anti-Stalin and quit the Party only when he discovered that Stalin was anti-Jew. This underlies the special weakness of Fast's tale. In fashioning Torquemada as a demented racist and centering...
Peoples U. The Chinese apparently decided to give White favored treatment in hopes of making him a Communist mouthpiece for the "oppressed Negro." After he was captured near Pyongyang, in North Korea, a Chinese commissar informed him: "You have been liberated. You have come over to the side of the people." Nonetheless, White spent the next three years in Chinese prison camps. Other prisoners of war who returned home testified that White became an informer on his fellow-G.I.s, was rewarded by being given special privileges and a soft job as prison camp mailman. When the armistice was signed...
...broods a character in André Malraux's Man's Fate, undoubtedly reflecting the author's own vision in the 1920s when he spent two years in Canton as propaganda commissar for the Kuomintang, which was then an alliance that included the Communists. Last week, for the first time in 40 years, Malraux was back in China as guest of the Red leaders who achieved the revolution Malraux worked for as a young man. Too individualistic ever to join the party, Malraux's own disillusion with Communism came with the Nazi-Soviet pact...
...that same year, Chagall was made commissioner of fine arts in Vitebsk by the newly formed Soviet government, and as a commissar he rapidly demonstrated that he was a divine idiot. He called for "revolutionary painters" and peppered the local party press with commissarty exhortations. His vision of the revolution was to make "ordinary houses into museums and the average citizen into a creator." Imagining that all the house painters of his native town were repressed artists, he spurred them on to decorating its drab buildings with folk imagery. When his superiors arrived from Moscow to find the walls covered...