Word: commissar
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Among the few people close enough to the late Dictator Stalin to address him by his nickname "Koba" was a fellow Georgian, Sergo Ordzhonikidze (rhymes roughly with poor-Johnny-kids-me), an oldtime Bolshevik who had risen to be top commissar of heavy industry. One day in 1936, during what Russians now call the Ezhovshchina (the purge which carried off some 7,000,000 Russians to Siberian prison camps and mass graves), Ordzhonikidze learned that his precious engineers were being arrested. Victor (1 Chose Freedom) Kravchenko, a minor executive of the Commissariat, later told of Ordzhoni-kidze's telephone...
...Marxist breed of equality (ravenstvo). "'By equality Marxism means, not equalization of individual requirements and individual life, but the abolition of classes,' said Stalin to the 17th Party Congress (1934)." And so on for a page of valuable documentation of George Orwell's porcine commissar whose classic formula was: "All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others." Similarly, Author Hodgkinson has fun with the word peace (mir) and the bellicose roarings of those who advocate it, including the Czech miner who promised to "batter the warmongers to death with peace...
...visited the Soviet zone of Germany and was lionized there, wrote a letter of praise for an old friend, now a Soviet literary commissar, and finally settled near Zurich, Switzerland...
...Greece, and the lovers took to the hills, where Niko raised the banner of bloody civil war. While Niko burned peasant villages and liquidated the old-line Communists who stood in his way to power, Roula, in her low-cut blouses and skin-tight riding pants, was promoted to commissar and recognized as the "Boss's Wife." Even in the hills, she was always well groomed, and in the words of one Communist deserter, "wore the only pair of nylons to be found in northern Greece...
...Snapshots. After such reversals, the time called for heroic measures, but not quite so heroic as Niko's returning to Greece himself. He decided to send Roula. Last February, Commissar Roula slipped across the border with her lover's instructions to reorganize the underground and bring back information on all the key figures in Greece. Niko's trusted old bodyguard was with her. Last week Athens announced that the two had been captured, and the Boss's Wife charged with espionage. In her pockets they found wads of drachmas and six well-thumbed photographs of five...