Word: commissars
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Everywhere, the Communists demanded stringent security measures, forced the Indian authorities to keep newsmen a safe distance from the Marshal and the Commissar. But when these measures broke down in Calcutta, the shadowy Third Man suddenly materialized. His pale cod eyes like ice, his big hands gripped into fists, he shouted harsh orders that made lesser goons leap. A snap of his fingers brought Soviet ambassadors running to his side...
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...
...knows whether impetuous Sergo Ordzhonikidze got a chance to raise hell in the Politburo, but he died shortly thereafter. In February 1937 he was buried with great pomp in the Kremlin wall, his flower-decked bier borne by Stalin. Molotov, Voroshilov and other top commissars. It was cautiously given out that he had died of heart failure, but rumor has consistently said since that he was murdered. In Russia his name became symbolic of the wreckage done to Soviet economy by Stalin and his gang in their struggle for power. Last week the Soviet government (run by Stalin...
...cruel ritual of Soviet propaganda executions, it did not matter that Lavrenty Beria, a party official in Georgia at the time Ordzhonikidze was commissar, probably had nothing to do with his murder. The logic, so far as Russia's present rulers were concerned, was the need to keep Beria's name before the people as the man responsible for the reckless Ezhovshchina. The West could only guess what pressures inside the Soviet Union made this still necessary, 18 years later, unless it was the identity of the real murderer...
...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...