Word: commissars
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...years when Georgy Malenkov was Stalin's personnel manager, he helped his boss build up a hierarchy of young technocrat-commissars. To get his men into key jobs, Malenkov had to shove out many a stubborn old Bolshevik. At the Commissariat of Heavy Industry, where old-line Commissar Ordzhonikidze gave notice that he would resist purging, Malenkov quietly put in his own security chief. The new man quickly turned over the commissariat's personnel files to the NKVD (central secret police), thus putting them in a position to purge most of Ordzhonikidze's engineers...
Everywhere, the Communists demanded stringent security measures, forced the Indian authorities to keep newsmen a safe distance from the Marshal and the Commissar. But when these measures broke down in Calcutta, the shadowy Third Man suddenly materialized. His pale cod eyes like ice, his big hands gripped into fists, he shouted harsh orders that made lesser goons leap. A snap of his fingers brought Soviet ambassadors running to his side...
...Unpopular Side. Like Socrates, Koestler is a man with the disconcerting habit of following arguments where they lead. This latest collection of his essays (more notable: The Yogi and the Commissar} reveals that Koestler is still looking for an adjudicator in the long debate in which, as in The Right to Say No, he habitually takes the con. People pro-any-thing get short shrift from Con-Man Koestler. Yet Americans should find themselves stimulated by this tough controversialist. Some examples of Koestler's talent for taking the unpopular side of an argument: ¶ In Judah...
...knows whether impetuous Sergo Ordzhonikidze got a chance to raise hell in the Politburo, but he died shortly thereafter. In February 1937 he was buried with great pomp in the Kremlin wall, his flower-decked bier borne by Stalin. Molotov, Voroshilov and other top commissars. It was cautiously given out that he had died of heart failure, but rumor has consistently said since that he was murdered. In Russia his name became symbolic of the wreckage done to Soviet economy by Stalin and his gang in their struggle for power. Last week the Soviet government (run by Stalin...
...cruel ritual of Soviet propaganda executions, it did not matter that Lavrenty Beria, a party official in Georgia at the time Ordzhonikidze was commissar, probably had nothing to do with his murder. The logic, so far as Russia's present rulers were concerned, was the need to keep Beria's name before the people as the man responsible for the reckless Ezhovshchina. The West could only guess what pressures inside the Soviet Union made this still necessary, 18 years later, unless it was the identity of the real murderer...