Word: commissariat
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...experience: if the government employee unions have anything to say about it (as they do), most of the work done by this national volunteer program will fall in category three: make-work. Only jobs that accomplish nothing important can really avoid trouble. Scandals are another easy prediction. A desperate Commissariat of Volunteerism will find itself placing young folks as interns at home decorating businesses or excusing them entirely on grounds of an allergy to cats. As with the discredited Vietnam-era draft, the challenge for bureaucrats will be finding ways NOT to use people - because there will be far more...
...sense of relief. An action hero works well within a simple story structure, but politics isn't a story; it's a process. It's not about confrontation and threat and revenge and triumph. It's mostly about civility, starting with the driver's license bureau of the Commissariat of Motor Vehicles and on up to the folks in the black robes. Most men and women in politics are there because they genuinely like people and want to do good things on their behalf. It's hard work, and fury isn't the best motivation. You have to sit through...
...your review "Blood Relatives" [Aug. 9] you say that our brother Alexander Pasternak was a member of Stalin's secret police, the Cheka. As an architect who designed one lock of the Moscow-Volga Canal. Alexander was employed by the Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) in 1936. The NKVD not only controlled all construction projects, like the canal and the metro, but had also taken over the functions of the Cheka. Accordingly, the NKVD uniform that Alexander was obliged to wear carried unpleasant associations, associations he detested because he was afraid of one department being confused with another, more...
...archaic law, any guest registering at a French hotel is required to fill out and sign a form, called la fiche, establishing his identity, address, occupation and, if a foreigner, his passport number. Fichisme is not only a chore for hoteliers, who must turn in the forms to the commissariat. For loving-if uncertified-couples, it can also be a mortifying ordeal, involving all the devices and evasions of a Feydeau comedy...
Once a wealthy import-export businessman, Sioris now holds a powerful post in the Greek military regime-the Ministry of Religion and Education-which many consider the commissariat of propaganda in a country where official views and explanations are accepted with a minimum of resistance...