Word: commissar
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Even without the weekly batch of transients, the Russian presence in Luxembourg is about as subtle as an elephant at a garden party. Ambassador Yevgeni Kosarev, a dour commissar-type who bores his fellow diplomats at cocktail parties by talking endlessly about grain crops, supervises an embassy of 36 Soviet officials-roughly one for every 10,000 Luxembourgers...
...make matters even worse for the Russians, a cost-conscious Moscow apparatchik decided that, though the Soviets would donate the statue-a duplicate already stands in a Vientiane park -the Laotians would have to transport it through the countryside to Luang Prabang. Miffed by such commissar chintziness, the Laotians have not bothered to move Luang Prabang's bronze statue out of storage in Vientiane...
...their own economies, so far with meager success. The trademarks of Communist economies remain indelible: low productivity, shortages of goods, lengthy queues in stores, years-long waits for apartments. In order to spur initiative, most Communist countries also have huge and growing differences in real income (and perquisites) between commissar and collective farmer. Nikita Khrushchev once replied to a charge that the Soviet Union was going capitalist: "Call it what you will, incentives are the only way to make people work harder...
...revolution and advanced quickly in a succession of jobs: member of the secret police, no-nonsense manager of a key Soviet electrical-equipment factory and mayor of Moscow. Although he had no battlefield command experience, Bulganin became a general during World War II. Actually, he was a political commissar, charged with the task of keeping Red Army officers loyal to the Kremlin's leaders. In 1947 Stalin promoted Bulganin to Marshal of the Soviet Union and also named him Deputy Premier-a post he held until the dictator's death in March 1953, when he assumed the powerful...
Significantly, Chang is a civilian; so is Teng, though he is a former member of Peking's National Defense Council and a political commissar who is highly respected by most army commanders. Their elevation to top army posts symbolizes Peking's ongoing effort to reassert firm civilian control over a professional military. The appointments also had political meaning. Just two years ago, Teng was still in disgrace, a victim of the Cultural Revolution's excesses; now, highly placed in all three of China's most powerful institutions, the party, the government and the army...