Word: commissar
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...point, Stalin called in Soviet Defense Commissar Kliment Voroshilov for a dressing down. Voroshilov angrily retorted: "You have yourself to blame for all this! You're the one that had our best generals killed!" With that, Khrushchev recalls, the Defense Commissar "picked up a platter with a boiled suckling pig on it and smashed it on the table." The 1939-40 "Winter War" cost about 1,000,000 Soviet lives, says Khrushchev, and ended in a "moral defeat" for Stalin, though the Finns agreed to pull back about seven miles...
Indispensable Tradition. The Swedish Academy cited Solzhenitsyn for "the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature." In a country where church, judiciary and other institutions have often proved unable to restrain the power of either czar or commissar, the writer has emerged as the last authoritative voice of conscience. Tolstoy protected peasants against religious persecution, and Pushkin nurtured democratic ideals that inspired the 1825 Decembrist uprising. Gorky sought to restrain the more brutal urges of the Bolsheviks, and Pasternak remained a symbol of moral values. Solzhenitsyn is aware of the power-and perils...
...earlier beatings, sealed off city hall from the demonstrators and patrolled the march. The mood was tense, not angry. Mayor John Lindsay was burned in effigy and denounced by many signs: IMPEACH THE RED MAYOR and, over a mock coffin, HERE LIES THE CITY OF NEW YORK BURIED BY COMMISSAR LINDSAY...
...Hunanese like Mao and had served as a top commissar in Lin Piao's Fourth Field Army. But he knew the dangers of simply slapping the Cantonese in line with his impressive credentials. Rising to speak during one of his first appearances in the city, T'ao modestly confessed he had just arrived and had little experience in Cantonese affairs. But, he said, seizing on his own introduction, experience wouldn't solve Canton's problems. It was class standpoint that had to be improved. He urged-here was the clincher-that all the lower level cadres criticize those superiors...
...able to locate the sharp edge of Merleau-Ponty's perception. The immediate object evoking his response was Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon . This account of the Moscow trials of the 1930's. presented as fiction, appeared in 1946. Along with his argumentation in The Yogi and the Commissar. Koestler's novel was taken as the expression, and for some, the justification of disillusion and inwardness, a mood then pervasive among Western intellectuals. The God That Failed, a book of essays about leaving the Communist Party, appeared in the same period, numbering among its contributors Andre Gide, Richard Wright...