Word: commissar
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...first target was Franz Murer, "the Butcher of Wilno," under whose aegis the Jewish population of the Lithuanian town was reduced from 80,000 to 250. Wiesenthal found him quite by accident in 1947; the ex-SS commissar was living on his prewar farm near Linz. Alerted by Jewish ex-partisans that a big Nazi was in the neighborhood, Wiesenthal checked with the local gendarmery. "The post commander was an old man with a drooping white mustache, probably a relic from the good old Habsburg days. We asked about the big farm on the hill. 'Belongs to Murer...
Because of a general shortage of personnel in the early years of the regime, most of the important leaders (both national and local) assumed multiple functions. For example, a provincial governor was also likely to be the provincial army political commissar and the provincial Party first secretary. The same situation prevailed in the capital at Peking. Then, coinciding approximately with the inauguration of the First Five-Year Plan (1953), functional specialization became the order or the day. Thus, virtually all leaders soon came to be identified with only one of the four categories mentioned above: the CCP, the government bureaucracy...
...Committee in 88 per cent of the cases, and by 1966 this had only dropped to slightly less than 70 per cent. The lack of upward mobility--indeed, the reverse of such mobility--is best illustrated in the People's Liberation Army (PLA). Using the key post of political commissar in the provinces, there are now more Central Committee members holding this post than in 1960. Any number of examples can be cited to show the lack of upward mobility in other Chinese institutions. A particularly interesting case is found within the Communist Youth League, an organization regarded...
Since the 17th century, under czar and commissar alike, a central facet of Russian foreign policy has been the drive toward the Middle East. Nicholas II almost secured both sides of the Dardanelles link to the Mediterranean with British help in World War I, but the Russian Revolution ended that. Stalin made an effort during World War II but was rebuffed. Not until Nikita Khrushchev came to absolute power in 1955 did the Soviet push begin to make headway...
...readers of the Hoover Institution's anthology, a simple moral emerges for the Red Chinese Commissar: those responsible for educational work in the army should have studied the reasons for these examples of backward thinking and tried to reform them. To that end, the Red Chinese army has developed a series of programs that sound like some sort of ideological drill manual. The "Three Skills Movement" emphasizes "four grasps and one investigation"; there are "five togethernesses" to combat the "five excessives" (excessive reports, excessive documents, excessive meetings, excessive persons in office, excessive general appeal) and two remembrances, which...