Word: commissar
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...Commissar Pilate. Bulgakov's novel is highly complicated, though there is consistency within the fantasy. He has succeeded in bringing the fear endemic to life under Stalin to a level where it can be borne-as excruciating comedy. Yet, while entertained by the absurd carryings-on of the Devil in Moscow, the reader is also made aware that grave matters of eternal importance are being decided behind the showy fireworks...
...Structure of Command. Each Viet Cong guerrilla is a cog in a complicated, disciplined command structure. At the apex in Hanoi sits Ho Chi Minh and his top political commissar, Le Duan, 59, who handles overall strategy for Ho's revolution. Also in Hanoi is Lieut. General Nguyen Van Vinh, 50, who directs the southward flow of men and supplies. It is to him that COSVN reports. Until he died last month, General Nguyen Chi Thanh commanded COSVN, aided by at least six other...
...powerful man in Soviet Russia and Lenin's obvious successor. At the age of 26 Trotsky had been the undisputed leader of the abortive revolution of 1905. In 1917 he returned to Russia from exile and he planned and led the successful Bolshevik insurrection of October. He served as Commissar of Foreign Affairs and than as Commissar of War. He created the Red Army and he defeated the forces of the counter-revolution in Russia's three year Civil...
This book by the London Observer's former Moscow correspondent fails to bring Khrushchev alive, but it raises questions about all the unknowns in his life: what was his childhood like; was he really a sadistic Stalinist during the old days as a commissar of the Moscow subway; did his war experiences turn him away from Stalin; did he become a "goulash Communist" only after the showdown in Cuba; why did he permit Brezhnev and Kosygin to ease him out? This book fails to answer those questions, but only Nikita can do the job-and he is unlikely...
...Prince." Stalin's daughter was powerfully struck by Zhivago mostly because she kept finding mystical parallels: between her own children and the book's young people, between her second husband ("whom I did not love") and the cold, mechanical commissar, and above all between herself and the doctor. "The Russia I have lost," she writes, "the Russia that has been taken from me by a cruel fate, as she was taken from Yuri Andreyevich Zhivago . . . wolves howl on your snow-covered plains, the land is still prey to folly and desolation, and there...