Word: commissar
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...outside Hungary concede that Sandor & Co., given a little help from some less talented trackmen, will not disappoint their countrymen: Hungary may be a small onion in the international goulash of sport, but it is a country with a determination to win. Explains ex-Sprinter Jozsef Sir (pronounced sheer), commissar of the track and field section of the sports council of the Ministry of Culture: "We train. That is our secret...
Nobody recognized the aging white-haired man who walked about Moscow, staring with rheumy eyes at the broad streets and tall buildings. He was Andrei Bubnov, one of the five top Bolsheviks to direct the October 1917 Revolution. As Lenin's Commissar of Education he had set out to create Homo sovieticus, the new Soviet man. But somewhere along the line, vodka-swilling Andrei Bubnov had tangled with a new type of Soviet man called Joseph Stalin, and in 1937 he disappeared. Unlike tens of thousands of other old Bolsheviks, Bubnov had survived 19 years of Soviet prison camps...
Ostensibly, Georgy had come in his new capacity as Russia's electricity commissar to inspect British power plants, but the truer reason for his trip became clear when the Soviet embassy announced that Malenkov would go along on only a few of the score of trips arranged for the Russian technicians who came to England with him. Instead of peering at generators in the provinces, Commissar Malenkov planned to remain in London generating a few millivolts of good will to break the ice for his bosses...
After working for a time with the Soviet secret police, Lo became a political commissar in the Chinese Red Army, made the famed Long March (1934-35) to the North, where Mao Tse-tung had fled from defeat by Chiang Kaishek. Here, in Shensi, Lo mastered the technique of intrigue: inciting disputes among the students at the Communist officers' school in order to expose their attitudes, recruiting and rewarding informers and isolating and arresting those who openly defied the Mao faction. Lo's big break came during one of the fratricidal struggles within the Communist forces, when...
...Toni's skill, days before the games ended the Russians were far enough in front to throw a victory party. All the medals they had won were reawarded by the Soviet National Health and Sports Commissar. Winners also got appropriately inscribed chocolate cakes. Later, there were still more medals, still more cakes for the Russian hockey team, which provided the last big surprise by beating Canada 2-0 to take the Olympic title...