Word: commissars
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...moral problem at the root of Watergate. It is the phenomenon of 20th century "amorality -a combination of technology, propaganda and administrative mentality; the kind of dangers Kafka and Orwell warned us of. The problem of the future is not ideology but technicians. Albert Speer [Hitler's industrial commissar] held conventional political views, was a family man, but Speer lacked any psychological and spiritual ballast. Our problem now is a general belieflessness, a nonideological commitment to the system...
Young Skelton is as concerned as Hemingway was with "a good death," but he is contemporary in knowing that there is no such thing. "There are no tremendous deaths any more. The pope, the president, the commissar all come to it like cigarette butts dropped to the sidewalk." Still, he clings to a notion of a powerful grace born of desperation, and goes off to a rendezvous with Dance where they both know the fish will be running...
...protests have opened a Pandora's box of grievances. At the top of the list is the so-called Decree Law 180, which empowers the government to in stall a "commissar" in each faculty. These are usually retired generals with few if any academic credentials; they operate a network of student informers and plainclothes policemen who check illegal student organizations and inform on teachers suspected of "subversive" lectures. Other grievances include the alleged rigging of student elections last November, plus a shortage of up-to-date books and other materials. Above all, the students are angered by the interrogation...
Laurence Harvey, who once played the Manchurian candidate, appears here as a Moscow commissar, sporting the kind of heavy leather trench coat that suggests Slavic villainy the way a black stetson in a western signals evil. He takes special delight in tor turing Jews. After inflicting one especially impassioned beating, Harvey makes his way out of the traditionally dank subterranean cell as an awestruck underling inquires, "What now? Are you going back to the office...
Soviet Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev spent World War II as a political commissar with the 18th army, rising in rank from colonel to major general. His primary task was to ensure the political probity of his fellow officers, but, the Soviet press now reports, he also had a harrowing and even heroic combat career...