Word: commissar
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...first challenge will be winning approval for his choice to replace Primakov, a colorless former political commissar named Sergei Stepashin. Unlike Primakov, Stepashin is largely unknown outside Russia. In the corridors of power he is recognized as a capable bureaucrat, and someone who in recent months has quietly become a presidential favorite. As head of the Federal Security Service, the successor to the kgb, he was a hawk during the war in Chechnya. And he remains deeply unpopular among Russian officers for the way he sent a covert force into Chechnya at the start of the war and disowned...
DICTATORIAL RUSSIA Greta Garbo is a humorless commissar in Ninotchka (1939; photo 2) who discovers that Western decadence is better than ideology...
...GOODGAME first met Bill Bennett while covering the Bush White House. "He was working on a chaw of Nicorette," Goodgame recalls of the then drug czar, "as he struggled--successfully--to overcome his addiction to cigarettes." This week Goodgame, now TIME's Washington bureau chief, profiles the Republican commissar of virtue. Traveling with Bennett, he reports, "is like a very good graduate seminar. When Bill finds something he likes to read, he's like Abe Lincoln, rereading the best parts until he's able to declaim them from memory. He has the same memory for anecdotes, including jokes...
...paintings presuppose a knowledge of Russian society, and above all a saturation with its period propaganda, that few in the West can claim. Why did it matter for political purposes that the writer Maxim Gorky should be depicted taking lessons on the rifle range from Marshal Voroshilov, the commissar of war? It mattered because Gorky, though a literary favorite and a devoted friend of Lenin's, was opposed to shooting, and this bothered Stalin...
...republic is cursed by its own demography. In that sense, it is a microcosm of the U.S.S.R. More than 80 nationalities share a territory half the size of Arkansas. The new, breakaway leadership tends to behave toward its minorities the way the Kremlin -- starting with the Bolsheviks' first commissar of nationalities, the Georgian Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, alias Stalin -- has treated the more than 100 peoples within the U.S.S.R. No wonder many of Georgia's Abkhasians, Adzhars, Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Ossetians and Russians do not regard Gamsakhurdia as their president...