Word: commissars
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...factory clerk, meagerly educated, joined the Bolsheviks in 1917, fought in Siberia. Afterwards turned bureaucrat-businessman. 1922, chief od Russia's largest electrical equipment plant; 1931, Mayor of Moscow; 1938, chairman of GOSBANK (Russia's Federal Reserve). In 1941, doffed his business suit, became political commissar of the armies defending Moscow, full general 1944, marshal 1947, but is primarily politician bossing army professionals. Politburo member, 1948. Small, neatly dressed, goateed, mild in manner and tone. Married a girl who worked in his electrical factory; no children, lives modestly. Travel outside the Iron Curtain: none...
...appropriations member of the Caucasian Bolshevik Bureau, i.e., he directed "fighting squads" which robbed banks, public treasuries, steamships. His biggest haul: a quarter of a million rubles in a stickup in the main square of Tiflis. Among those arrested as a result of this raid was Litvinov, future Commissar for Foreign Affairs, who was trying to dispose of the loot in Paris. Koba, although on the police "wanted" list, managed to keep in the background. He was a terrorist, but a terrorist who operated through committees. This was caution; none ever questioned his personal courage...
...Siberia, but took small part in these momentous events. U.S. Journalist John Reed did not even mention him in Ten Days That Shook the World. But Stalin, the Inside Man, emerged as one of the seven members of the party's political bureau and was appointed Commissar of Nationalities. Joked Lenin: "No intelligence is needed, that is why we've put Stalin there...
...Marriage. Trotsky skyrocketed into world prominence as organizer and Commissar of the Red army in the civil war. Stalin, in charge of the defense of Tsaritsyn (later Stalingrad), kept up a running feud with Trotsky and carried the war, against orders, into his native Georgia. In these violent days, he was married a second time, to Nadezhda Allilueva. the pretty daughter of the Petrograd worker in whose house he had once been arrested...
Among the Socialist intellectuals of her home town, the swarthy, shock-haired Georgian added nothing to the brilliant debates in which such men as Lunacharsky, Commissar of Education, the historian Pokrovsky, and Ryazanov, biographer of Marx, took part. His harsh Georgian accent put him at a disadvantage in public speechmaking. Someone asked: "Who is Stalin?" Snapped Trotsky: "The most eminent mediocrity in the Party." But Stalin worked purposefully in committees. His Nationalities Commissariat, which had begun with a bare table in a bare room, numbered hundreds of "experts" and his control extended over 65 million of Russia...