Word: commissars
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...Bolshevik Nicolas Rubashov, former People's Commissar, former commander in the Red Army, a fictional composite of the late liquidated Leo Kamenev and Nikolai Bukharin, is broken down by the GPU, induced to sign a false confession and declare at a public trial that he had plotted to murder "No. 1"-Stalin. Penalty: "physical liquidation." The men who succeeded in making old Rubashov confess ("To have laid out a Rubashov meant the beginning of a great career") were GPU Inquisitors Ivanov and Gletkin. Ivanov had been Rubashov's former schoolmate, former battalion commander. He drank, he doped...
...Less convincing is Werner's analysis of the Russo-Finnish War, which turns out in Werner's hands to have been much more of a victory for Russian arms and Russian benignity than is generally supposed. According to Werner, who takes his Soviet military figures from War Commissar Klimenti Voroshilov and other Soviet sources, Russia's military strength is almost twice as great as Germany's. The future of the world depends upon Russia and the U.S. Russia, he says authoritatively, would like to join the Anglo-Saxon powers in trimming Hitler's wings. There...
...only times the top-hatted, morning-coated little Foreign Minister seemed to brighten were when he talked to men of peace. In Moscow Peaceful Joe Stalin dropped in on Yosuke Matsuoka's interview with Foreign Commissar Viacheslav Molotov, and Matsuoka glowed. In Rome the Protestant Japanese and the Pope had a long, 65-minute talk. Afterward the Pope told a group of Japanese seminarists that the interview had been "a fine one." Minister Matsuoka called it "the prettiest moment of my life...
More important, if less well known, heads were rolling too. Removed as alternate Committee member was Paulina Semionovna Zhemchuzhina, for five years head of Russia's big cosmetics trust, upped to Vice Commissar of the Food Industry in 1937-and the wife of Premier and Foreign Commissar Viacheslav Molotov...
...Central Committee members pushed in to fill the vacant posts bore names which stood for principles rather than individuals. One was V. G. Dekanozov, onetime Deputy Foreign Commissar, who went to Berlin with Commissar Molotov three months ago, stayed on as ambassador. Another was Otto Kuusinen, head of the abortive Finnish People's Government during the Russo-Finnish war, elected president of the Karelian-Finnish Soviet Republic after his 1939 coup flopped...