Word: commissar
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Chief political commissar of Mao's personal forces on the March, he went on to fight the war against the Japanese in the mountain province of Shanxi. In the "Liberation War" he rose to become political commissar of the revolutionary Second Field Army; he wound up both wars with a record of glory and rose to membership in the Standing Committee by 1956. With the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution, he was officially named the "No. 2 capitalist reader" in the party, after Liu Shaoqi. Accused of arrogance, gluttony and dissolute habits (addiction to bridge and mah-jongg...
...Soviet Union's ruling Politburo and, as the token representative of the Baltic states, perhaps its least influential; after a long illness. Last of the old Bolsheviks who played a leading role in the October Revolution of 1917, Pelshe worked as a secret policeman and political commissar; when the Soviet army occupied his country in 1940, he became one of its new rulers. Elevated to the Politburo in 1966, Pelshe headed the Party Control Committee, which oversees the discipline of party members. His death reduces membership in the Politburo, which has numbered as many as 16, to a scant...
...this big, handsome book. Dance Critic Clive Barnes' chronicle charts the dancer's career back to its beginnings in the remote Bashkir Republic of the U.S.S.R., where, as a teenager, Rudi jumped and twirled in local folk dances. Battling the disapproval of his Tatar father, a Communist commissar, the youth made his way into Leningrad's celebrated Kirov company. Following his defection in Paris in 1961, he danced non-stop in virtually every Western company except the New York City Ballet. Now 45, he can still dance seven performances a week, apparently without tiring. Barnes insists that...
...readers throughout the Western world. It was a bestseller in the U.S., and a 1951 dramatization by Sidney Kingsley, with Claude Rains in the central role, was a hit on Broadway. Following Darkness, Koestler wrote several powerfully antitotalitarian books, including Arrival and Departure (1943) and The Yogi and the Commissar (1945), and an eloquent contribution to The God That Failed (1950), a collection of essays by former members of the Communist Party...
...Yugoslavia and the last of Josip Broz Tito's comrades-in-arms still in power; after a long illness; in Zagreb. A Croatian lawyer and a Communist Party member since 1933, he joined Tito's partisan army during World War II and served as its political commissar, later rising to membership in the party's ruling Politburo. Under the rotating system of collegial presidency in use since Tito's death, Bakaric was due to become chief of state this spring...