Word: commissars
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Blind Mayer" explains, "It's not the old Warsaw anymore. Gone, buried. Once everyone had his own territory. Now the worst lowlife comes here. Nobody knows anybody else...In my day, Commissar Voynov drank brandy with us. The sergeant used to bow to me and show me respect, may I live to be buried in a Jewish cemetary...
Something else I know. When Stalin came to Leningrad to investigate Kirov's murder, he ordered the commissar who had been personally responsible for guarding Kirov that day brought to him for interrogation. The truck taking him to see Stalin crashed, and the commissar was killed...
Much later, there was an attempt to find and question the people who were escorting the commissar at the time of the accident. They had all been shot. I suggested looking for the driver. Fortunately, he was alive. He told us there hadn't been a serious accident at all, just a dented fender. But he did recall hearing a thump in the back of the covered truck. That was the end of the commissar...
...citizens thronged the streets with banners that could be loosely translated THROW THE BUMS OUT! This time it was in the Kremlin that the bums themselves seemed to take heed and the custodians of absolute power began the process of giving it up. And this time Mikhail Sergeyevich, the Commissar Liberator, was not somewhere over the horizon, letting it all happen. He was on the podium, making it happen...
...over time, fewer and fewer Russians fit the stereotype of illiterate peasants on whose bovine passivity Czar or commissar could rely. Soviets were increasingly well educated and well informed, in spite of the propaganda poured over them. And while they reached political maturity, their leadership sank into senility. The people cringed when they heard the doddering Leonid Brezhnev try to form his words and when they learned that his hands were so shaky he had to eat with a spoon at a state dinner. They told scornful jokes: state radio, cynics said, dared not play any work by Tchaikovsky...