Word: commissars
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...luck, he touched all wars, all revolutions, all causes; born a Roman Catholic in 1897, he was by turns a boy soldier in the Kaiser's army, a student Freikorpsmann, i.e., pre-stormtrooper, a follower of the doomed German left, an anti-Hitler refugee in Paris, a political commissar with the Red forces in Spain, a refugee again in Mexico. Now this richly wounded hero of the class war, living in Mexico and blacklisted by both left and right, has returned to haunt an affluent generation that does not believe in ghosts but is scared of them...
...apple polishing, buck passing, of loading ledgers and unloading responsibility, finding loopholes in Parkinson's Law and keeping ahead by one whisker in the career race. Marx wrote: "The Communists seek to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class," but any bright boy of the commissar caste should have a good laugh over this. If he fails to make a grade, he disappears without appeal into the grey unprivileged proletarian mass below. Inch by inch, his nose ever clean, he works through the Comsomols (Communist youth groups) and elementary science instruction, through the barracks and blackboards...
...Economic Commissar. With the shakeup, the form of the Castro government, months in the shaping, came clear. Fidel Castro, who helicopters about the country dispensing largesse from the blue National Bank checkbook he always carries in his breast pocket, is political chief. His pony-tailed brother Raul is military boss, commanding the 35,000-man rebel army that is the regime's principal arm of force and terror, notably for rounding up all suspected oppositionists on a charge of "counterrevolution" (last week's bag: 250 prisoners...
Guevara, a slim asthmatic who keeps a glass inhalator close at hand, becomes the country's economic commissar (while holding onto his auxiliary job as commander of Havana's Cabana Fortress). The son of an Argentine Communist mother, Guevara got his M.D. in Buenos Aires, then decided that "curing nations is more exciting than curing people." He turned up in Red-lining Guatemala of the early 1950s, where the man who was instructed to hire him as an inspector in the Agrarian Department remembers only that Che was identified as a "Communist from abroad." With this sinecure...
...polkas, waltzes and 19th century Russian ballroom dances that the Czar's court once favored. President Kliment Voroshilov forgot his 78 years to sail off across the floor with Ekaterina Furtseva, the only woman member of the ruling Presidium. Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan flashed gaily around with one commissar's wife after another. It was a long way from the barricades...