Word: commissar
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...protests have opened a Pandora's box of grievances. At the top of the list is the so-called Decree Law 180, which empowers the government to in stall a "commissar" in each faculty. These are usually retired generals with few if any academic credentials; they operate a network of student informers and plainclothes policemen who check illegal student organizations and inform on teachers suspected of "subversive" lectures. Other grievances include the alleged rigging of student elections last November, plus a shortage of up-to-date books and other materials. Above all, the students are angered by the interrogation...
Laurence Harvey, who once played the Manchurian candidate, appears here as a Moscow commissar, sporting the kind of heavy leather trench coat that suggests Slavic villainy the way a black stetson in a western signals evil. He takes special delight in tor turing Jews. After inflicting one especially impassioned beating, Harvey makes his way out of the traditionally dank subterranean cell as an awestruck underling inquires, "What now? Are you going back to the office...
Soviet Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev spent World War II as a political commissar with the 18th army, rising in rank from colonel to major general. His primary task was to ensure the political probity of his fellow officers, but, the Soviet press now reports, he also had a harrowing and even heroic combat career...
...doldrums of exile that Trotsky became a leading Socialist theoretician and defender of what he saw as the only true political faith -permanent, international revolution of the urban working class. As stage manager of the Russian Revolution's 1905 dress rehearsal, as founder of the Red Army and Commissar of War after 1917, Trotsky tasted his share of glory and power...
...exhibited. The reference was, of course, to Dean Acheson's book: Present at the Creation. As I explicitly stated to the interviewer, one felt in China that one was literally present at the creation of a new society and more presently than Acheson had in mind when that "Commissar of the Cold War"--in Ronald Steel's happy phrase--described, under that title, his role in launching the Cold War. And on any reckoning, whether one likes it or not, China is today creating a new society remarkably different from its pre-Liberation days as also from the other underdeveloped...