Word: commissars
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Voroshilov Academy of the General Staff in Moscow. The obituary, however, placed his name alongside those of the chiefs of the Main Political Directorate of the Armed Forces, which oversees the Communist Party's control over the military. If Ogarkov has indeed become a sort of political commissar, it would be an ironic appointment for a career officer with a reputation for being at odds with the party's views on military strategy. The precise reason for his demotion remains unknown; Western military analysts suggest that the marshal might have been dismissed because he favored a conventional over a nuclear...
Chief political commissar of Mao's personal forces on the March, he went on to fight the war against the Japanese in the mountain province of Shanxi. In the "Liberation War" he rose to become political commissar of the revolutionary Second Field Army; he wound up both wars with a record of glory and rose to membership in the Standing Committee by 1956. With the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution, he was officially named the "No. 2 capitalist reader" in the party, after Liu Shaoqi. Accused of arrogance, gluttony and dissolute habits (addiction to bridge and mah-jongg...
...future is probably Hu Yaobang, 68, General Secretary of the party. A peppery personality, Hu ran away from home at the age of 14 to join the Communists; trooped with them on the Long March to north China; served against both Japanese and Nationalists, rising to political commissar of an entire army group by the end of the Liberation War. He was once private secretary to Liu Shaoqi, and during the war was close to Deng too. His punishment by the Cultural Revolutionaries was years in the stables, eating and sleeping with sheep and horses...
...Soviet Union's ruling Politburo and, as the token representative of the Baltic states, perhaps its least influential; after a long illness. Last of the old Bolsheviks who played a leading role in the October Revolution of 1917, Pelshe worked as a secret policeman and political commissar; when the Soviet army occupied his country in 1940, he became one of its new rulers. Elevated to the Politburo in 1966, Pelshe headed the Party Control Committee, which oversees the discipline of party members. His death reduces membership in the Politburo, which has numbered as many as 16, to a scant...
...this big, handsome book. Dance Critic Clive Barnes' chronicle charts the dancer's career back to its beginnings in the remote Bashkir Republic of the U.S.S.R., where, as a teenager, Rudi jumped and twirled in local folk dances. Battling the disapproval of his Tatar father, a Communist commissar, the youth made his way into Leningrad's celebrated Kirov company. Following his defection in Paris in 1961, he danced non-stop in virtually every Western company except the New York City Ballet. Now 45, he can still dance seven performances a week, apparently without tiring. Barnes insists that...