Word: commissars
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Save the Scum. Last week Premier Otto Grotewohl appointed what West Berliners promptly labeled a "commissar for the prevention of flights"; to fill the job he dipped into the Communist penalty box and came up with Gerhart Eisler, the shifty little Comintern agent who recently lost his job as East German propaganda chief, and was presumed on the way out. He explained his long absence from the political arena without a smile: "I had to have my teeth repaired." Then he turned to the refugees. They were all "underworld characters, trash proletarians, black marketeers and scum . . ." but anyway, Eisler...
Died. Lev Zakharovich Mekhlis, 64, one of two Jews* holding top-ranking posts in the U.S.S.R.; reportedly of a heart attack. A longtime Stalin favorite, he was a veteran revolutionist, editor of Pravda, vice-commissar of defense, and army political commissar. As Commissar of State Control, Mekhlis was wartime production boss (he directed the evacuation of industry to the east) and chief inspector of the Soviet economy until illness forced his retirement in 1950. Red leaders, busy at their purge of Jews, announced to the world their "profound grief " at Mekhlis' death and staged an elaborate state funeral...
...Commissar. Born the son of a miner in the tiny Ukrainian village of Kalinovka, Khrushchev is what the Communists call a Vydvizhenets, one who is "pushed forward." As commissar for metropolitan Moscow, he no longer affects a worker's peaked cap, but still orates in the rough accent of his early years as a shepherd lad and a child laborer in the Czar's coal mines...
Guerrilla. In World War II, Khrushchev took charge of the mass guerrilla movement that scorched the black earth of the Ukraine in the Wehrmacht's rear, won the Stalingrad Medal for his services as a political commissar. At war's end he went back to the war-charred Ukraine with orders from the Kremlin to 1) revive its agriculture and heavy industry; 2) liquidate the Ukrainians who had collaborated with the Nazis. He succeeded on both counts. "Half the leading workers have been done away with," he boasted...
...brothers, it all seems like a new world. From this point on, Soloviev charges through the nightmare of modern Russia at breakneck speed, tracing Mark Surov's career through the civil war in Moscow during the infancy of the revolution, and then a gruesome interval as commissar in Far Eastern Siberia...