Word: commissars
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...entire Politburo dropped from public view, possibly because its members had been summoned to an emergency session in Peking. China's military leaders also disappeared, including Chief of Staff Huang Yung-sheng, one of his deputy chiefs of staff, the chief of the air force, the First Commissar of the navy and at least twelve senior officers in the Peking military headquarters; they have not been seen since. After a British-made tri-jet Trident transport mysteriously crashed deep in Mongolia, the Chinese air force was grounded; not until seven weeks later were some essential flights resumed...
...very moment of his fall, Nikita Khrushchev was noted for similarly compelling powers of persuasion-and political survival. The son of a peasant farmer in the Ukraine, he worked as a shepherd, steam fitter and coal miner. In 1918 he joined the Red Army, quickly becoming a political commissar. As a delegate to the 14th Party Congress in 1925, he skipped breakfast every morning so he could get a front seat near Stalin...
...What spy?" asked the man at his side, an Izvestia correspondent who was aboard the cruiser because Defense Minister Andrei Grechko, Fleet Admiral Sergei Gorshkov and General Aleksei Yepishev, the top political commissar for the Soviet military, were paying a visit to Moscow's Mediterranean fleet...
Life was full of grotesque jokes straight out of Gogol. The author tells of the commissar who had to put a stop to patriotic letters denouncing offenders against the regime because his office could not handle the flow. She notes Stalin's surprise phone call to Boris Pasternak to ask the author of the yet unwritten Dr. Zhivago just how good a poet Mandelstam was. Pasternak cautiously digressed and then suggested that he and Stalin meet for a chat. "About what?" asked the voice from the Kremlin. "About life and death," replied Pasternak. Stalin hung...
...probably had no involvement in some of the more spectacular phonies foisted on the West. The so-called "memoir" by the late Maxim Litvinov, Stalin's Foreign Commissar, was actually produced by a Soviet defector in Paris, while The Penkovsky Papers, purportedly the diaries of a spy in the upper echelon of the Soviet intelligence system who was caught and shot, were allegedly partly concocted...