Word: commissars
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Divorced. Arthur Koestler, 48, Hungarian-born ex-Communist writer of political novels (Darkness at Noon) and politico-mystical essays (The Yogi and the Commissar); by his second wife, Mamaine Paget Koestler, 36; after almost four years of marriage, no children; in London...
...ballet staggered on, saved by the fact that Anatoly Lunacharsky, a playwright and novelist who became Commissar of Education, was a ballet fan.* The starveling staff of dancers danced for their Soviet suppers in the same old, Czar-favored style. But when the chance came to take a small troupe on a tour of Germany, Dancer George Balanchine, then 20, leaped...
Host Molotov was plainly irritated at his fellow party Presidium member, First Deputy Premier Lazar Kaganovich, who, despite repeated shushings, insisted on proposing toast after toast, while waspish Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan heckled him from the side. At one point Kaganovich, a former Ukrainian commissar, called the company's attention to "the great friendship of all peoples of the So viet Union," listing the Soviet states with one pointed omission. "What about the Georgians?" snapped Armenian Mikoyan, an old friend of Georgian Lavrenty Beria who had been arrested four months before. "Oh yes," said Kaganovich without enthusiasm, "the Georgians...
...Nazis launched a mass slaughter which so aroused the survivors as to provide the Red army with a vast guerrilla underground that slashed at the Wehrmacht's rear. Khrushchev, a lieutenant general, commanded a Ukrainian guerrilla army, and won a medal for the defense of Stalingrad. Political commissar for all Russian armies on the southern front, he ruthlessly purged collaborators in city after city recaptured from the Germans. By 1947 Khrushchev was able to report: "Half the Ukraine's leading party workers have been done away with-65% of the presidents of regional soviet, two-thirds...
...thinkers (e.g., Engels) sneer at the muzhiks as "a class of barbarians" with an "anti-collective skull," condemned by history to inexorable extinction. Communist bosses (e.g., Stalin) have consistently endeavored to make the prophecy come true, and the result is a never-ending war between the muzhik and the commissar...