Word: commissars
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Nelson arrived in Spain in February 1937 and fought for more than a year until the International Brigades were sent home by the republicans in 1938. In Spain, he served as the brigade's second-in-command, the political commissar. But only a small part of his career as a Marxist actively seeking change was spent in Spain. Born in Yugoslavia in 1904, Nelson emigrated to the U.S. and became a radical worker in the 1920s, soon joining the Communist Party and becoming embroiled in the battles of the American left. As a party member, Nelson agitated for unions, civil...
...unique set of interviews, Chiang Ch'ing summed up her stormy career as both sex symbol and potentate, movie actress and commissar. The slim, pretty actress from Shanghai who became the wife of Mao Tse-tung tried to turn her marriage to a modern-day emperor into supreme power of her own. She almost succeeded, and for a decade she was one of the world's most powerful women. As the virtual ruler over the culture of 850 million people, she determined what they could see on stage or screen...
Nonetheless, Chiang Ch'ing immediately set about to join the small and weak local Communist Party. Leftist art circles were dominated, among others, by future Cultural Commissar Chou Yang, an orthodox party functionary. (Chou was eventually purged in the Cultural Revolution.) Chou and his coterie, Chiang Ch'ing recalled with great bitterness, kept her on the edges of the Communist organization during her four years in Shanghai. She never became a member of the secret inner-party circle. For a while the party placed her in a job as a night school instructor in a Y.W.C.A. literacy program...
Chiang Ch'ing herself was accused on wall posters of trying to murder Mao. Some said she had "nagged" him to death; others claimed she "ignored the doctor's advice and wanted to move [Mao] from his sickbed, trying in vain to kill him." The deputy political commissar of Canton also denounced "the self-styled student of our leader"-a reference to the fact that Chiang Ch'ing's wreath at Mao's funeral had been signed "your student and comrade-in-arms." One wall poster in Shanghai bluntly accused Mao's widow...
Third in the line was Chang Ch'un-ch'iao, about 65, Vice Premier of the state council, political commissar of the People's Liberation Army and the man said to be acting secretary-general of the Communist Party. There is quickness and intelligence in his eyes and a darting intensity that suggests a gift for calculation. Chang has a reputation among Westerners he has met for being opinionated and untactful while displaying an intellectually sharp cutting edge...