Word: commissars
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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When the Soviet Union's Foreign Commissar, roly-poly Maxim Maximovich Litvinoff was reminded by correspondents last spring that Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union have no common frontier and was asked how his country could possibly go to Czechoslovakia's aid in case of war, the Commissar exclaimed: "Where there's a will there...
...Commissar Litvinoff knew without asking that anti-Communist Poland would fight before allowing Soviet troops to pass over its territory to Czechoslovakia. Since German absorption of Austria, however, Dictator King Carol of Rumania has become friendlier to the Soviet Union, less friendly to Germany. Last week, in Geneva, while the League of Nations Council held a speedy six-minute meeting in which eight non-controversial reports were adopted prior to the convening this week of the League Assembly, Rumanian and Soviet League delegations allowed the fact to leak out that Commissar Litvinoff and Rumanian Foreign Minister Petrescu-Comnen were discussing...
Russians who wanted facts turned from this fighting budget speech to a meaty report Commissar Zverev made in the official publication Bolshevik. In this, Commissar Zverev blames on his purged predecessor, Grigory Grinko, four major shortcomings in Soviet finance: 1) persistently low purchasing power of the ruble; 2) long arrears in salaries which the State owes to personnel of the Motor & Tractor Stations (some have been unpaid for as much as two years); 3) closing by the State of a total of 26,000 Soviet savings banks and institutions; 4) chaotic conditions in the Soviet tax system...
...shortage of those eminently bourgeois institutions, savings banks, seemed particularly to bother Commissar Zverev. who deplored that "430 districts of the Union are completely deprived of savings institutions." He promised to open this year 5,700 new savings banks. Finally he gave a sweeping pledge to "rationalize" the now almost infinitely complex taxation system of the Soviet Union, announced some progress already made: "We have rationalized in the food industry where, instead of 608 tax rates, we have introduced but 167. We are also revising the taxation system in the wool, cotton and silk industries. But this is not enough...
...Commissar Zverev in the course of his ringing budget speech ranged far & wide over all phases of Soviet Union life in striking phrases. There are 33,000,000 pupils in Soviet elementary and secondary schools, he declared, and the proletarian State boasts of no less than 50,000,000 bondholders. Putting in figures with broad brush strokes, Commissar Zverev reported that: 1) the State's revenues would be 125,184,000,000 rubles (of which 83,000,000,000 rubles is to come from turnover taxes); 2) the State's expenditures would be 123,684,000,000 rubles...