Word: commissars
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...profoundly disillusioned vith the Czar's conduct of the war. To crush active opposition to their rule, the Bolsheviks formed an army out of bands of irregulars, war refugees, peasants, groups of industrial workers and trade unionists. "Even after defeats and retreats," reported Trotsky, the first Bolshevik War Commissar, "the flabby, panicky mob would be transformed in two or three weeks into an efficient fighting force. It needed good commanders, a few dozen experienced fighters, a dozen or so Communists ready to make any sacrifice." Commanders and experienced fighters were drawn from the old Czarist army...
Because other ex-Czarist officers had been going over to the Whites, often with their troops, the Bolsheviks in 1918 appointed commissars to every Red army unit: stone-hard Communists whose job it was to make men and officers accept "the spirit of revolutionary discipline," or else. Said Realist Trotsky: "An army cannot be built without reprisals. Masses of men cannot be led to death unless the army command has the death penalty in its arsenal." Thus began the pernicious commissar system which years later was to bring the army, and Soviet Russia itself, almost to destruction...
...When Commissar Trotsky set about building a peacetime defense force out of the revolutionary Red army, he had revolt on his hands. He was able to form a general staff, training and technical commands out of a nucleus of experienced ex-Imperial army officers, among whom was the future Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky. The old irregulars objected to being educated. Georgy Zhukov was an exception. When the chance came for a military course at Moscow's Frunze Academy, he grabbed it. Chief of Staff Boris Shaposhnikov thought him "somewhat slow," but sent him off to Germany to study under General...
...area the independent kingdom of Kao Kang." In the State Planning job he had "tried to instigate party members in the army to support his conspiracy." Expelled with Kao were seven other lesser party leaders, including rugged, mustachioed Jao Shu-shih, secretary of the Central Committee and onetime political commissar of the New Fourth Army...
Borodin did a stint of work in Moscow, but seeing a prominent commissar throw himself under a passing bus helped Borodin decide that life in the south would be healthier than in the capital, and he went to Baku. Borodin might still be a Baku bureaucrat if, in 1945, the government had not summoned him to go overseas and study penicillin production. Shuttling back and forth between Russia, Britain and the U.S., Borodin forgot his resolution to stay clear of the Moscow meat grinder. His chief, Andrei Tretyakov, seemed to be on the skids.* Scientists in all fields were being...