Word: commissar
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...century; in Moscow. Voroshilov was a tireless agitator during the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, rallying workers and soldiers, helping to organize the dreaded Cheka (secret police); during the civil war that followed, he distinguished himself as one of the founders of the Red armed forces, and in 1925 was appointed Commissar of War. Blindly loyal to Stalin, in 1935 he was named a Marshal of the Soviet Union, and rose to the post of assistant chairman of the party's defense committee. With Stalin's death in 1953, he became President of the U.S.S.R., a post from which...
...outbursts. In the first blatantly political arrests since the invasion, police have detained at least 50 persons for printing or distributing "antisocialist" leaflets. Czechoslovakia's Communist Party has issued stern warnings against "provocations." An ominous visitor has arrived in Prague. He is Soviet General Aleksei Epishev, chief political commissar of the Russian army and a member of the Soviet Central Committee, whose job it is to repress political dissent...
...abroad, and he is a widely traveled rarity among North Vietnamese officials. Fluent in French and Chinese, he has touted Hanoi's line in Vienna, Stockholm and Rangoon, as well as Peking, Moscow and other Communist capitals, where he has generally appeared in the guise of a journalistic commissar. The softspoken, stumpy Thuy, whose name means spring water, emulates stay-at-home apparatchiki in one respect: his private life is shadowed in secrecy. Thuy is known to have married and fathered children, but his family has been kept as hidden from foreign eyes as the bargaining points he carries...
...three, all of whom were removed from their posts, were important men indeed: General Yang Chengwu, who as acting chief of the general staff had been second only to Lin Piao in the military hierarchy; General Yu Li-chin, the political commissar of China's air force; and General Fu Chung-pi, commander of the army's vital Peking garrison. All three had taken an active part in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that has been tearing China apart, and all three were appointed to their jobs by Lin Piao...
...guns of the cruiser Aurora fired a blank salvo at the Winter Palace in Petrograd and started the October Revolution. At first, sailors were the new Soviet government's most trusted fighters, but Lenin managed to alienate them. He put in charge of the navy a commissar who was, of all things, a woman, named Larisa Reisner-Raskol-nikova, and refused to allow the sailors to organize their own self-ruling local governments. As a result, the Baltic Fleet suddenly mutinied in 1921. Lenin crushed the revolt, but he never forgave the navy. He demoted it to the inglorious position...