Word: commissars
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...corner, he waited patiently until a grey Opel sedan got almost abreast of him in the narrow street. Then, calmly setting his shopping bag on the sidewalk, he pulled out a Beretta submachine gun and opened fire. Inside the car 34-year-old Colonel Ghassan Jedid Defense Commissar of Syria's outlawed Socialist Nationalist Party and onetime commandant of the Syrian military academy, slumped over dead...
Italians, aroused by the events in Hungary, for the most part rejoiced in this rebuke to the commissar. But one official in the Foreign Office sighed: "The presence of Suslov at the congress would have been an embarrassment to [Italy's Red Boss] Togliatti, because it would have been clear evidence of Togliatti's subjection to Moscow, and to the toughest Stalinist in Europe. Togliatti will find things easier without him." As for fears that Suslov's presence might provoke anti-Russian demonstrations, a Western diplomat cracked: "A little pushing around wouldn't hurt...
...this, if so minded. Although functioning in part as a kind of auditor general's department, the Ministry of State Control means what it says: through it the organs of government are controlled, i.e., policed, and it has power to bring charges against any state employee, be he commissar or clerk. Stalin held the office years ago and used it (together with the Party Control Commission which does a corresponding job within the party apparatus) to win absolute power. Most distinguished of recent State Control Ministers: Vsevolod Merkulov, a Beria man, executed along with Beria...
Died. Eliena Krylenko Eastman, 61, Polish-born Russian landscape painter, muralist and onetime (1921) secretary to Maxim Litvinoff (then Vice Commissar of Soviet Foreign Affairs), sister of Nikolai Krylenko, onetime Soviet chief prosecutor who was purged in 1938, and wife of oldtime socialist Max (Reflections on the Failure of Socialism) Eastman; of cancer; in Gay Head, Mass...
Once, so the story goes, a Soviet commissar visited Violinist David Oistrakh in Odessa, looked into a cradle and sternly ordered, "Make that boy as good a violinist as his father." For a while it looked as if nothing like that could ever happen. David Oistrakh was already on his way to being one of the world's finest fiddlers, and young Igor showed signs of detesting violin sounds from the time he started making them at the age of six. But they kept his bow to the catgut. At 18 he entered the Moscow conservatory, became a master...