Word: apparatchiks
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...momentous decisions in the Soviet Union last week were approved by the Communist Party's 249-member Central Committee. Or should that be 250-member? Our Moscow bureau chief, John Kohan, asked his secretary to check with the International Department of the Central Committee. The apparatchik there said he had "no idea." Kohan's secretary then called the Committee's General Department, which refused to supply any information. Next she tried a back channel, asking a Soviet magazine editor for the number to call. Kohan then got the answer he needed (249 members) from the Central Committee's Department...
Much more than that, Gorbachev is a visionary enacting a range of complex and sometimes contradictory roles. He is simultaneously the communist Pope and the Soviet Martin Luther, the apparatchik as Magellan and McLuhan. The Man of the Decade is a global navigator...
Meanwhile, the national Communist Party is under attack from within. Last month the leaders of Leningrad's Communist Party arranged an unprecedented demonstration to criticize Moscow for not defending the party against glasnost-inspired attacks. If this outburst reflects apparatchik sentiment, legalizing competitive groups would arouse not only outrage but perhaps a concerted effort to oust Gorbachev. The Leningrad protest provoked a countermarch by some 40,000 incensed citizens who proclaimed their support for Gorbachev's efforts to rejuvenate the party through open criticism...
...name at the top of the party roster reads Jiang Zemin, but power in China still rests in the hands of a few octogenarians. So it made sense for them to choose as party General Secretary a man known as "the weather vane." Jiang is the consummate apparatchik, whose rise to nominal power rests almost wholly on his ability to read China's swirling political winds correctly. The 63-year-old former mayor of Shanghai perfectly mirrors the party line of the moment -- slower economic reform coupled with rigid political orthodoxy -- as he made clear last week in his maiden...
...death in 1975, Dmitri Shostakovich was regarded by many Western critics as the quintessential Communist Party musical apparatchik. The thin- lipped, bespectacled composer presented a bland face to the world, periodically bowing his head to the artistic dictates of Soviet authority and writing propagandistic tub thumpers to cloak his occasional forays into modernism. Or so it seemed...