Word: commissars
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...citizens thronged the streets with banners that could be loosely translated THROW THE BUMS OUT! This time it was in the Kremlin that the bums themselves seemed to take heed and the custodians of absolute power began the process of giving it up. And this time Mikhail Sergeyevich, the Commissar Liberator, was not somewhere over the horizon, letting it all happen. He was on the podium, making it happen...
...task and, conversely, a breathtaking audacity in discarding what he believes is less than vital. This year, without a great deal of visible hand wringing, he decided that Soviet domination of Eastern Europe was a drag on his campaign to restructure the Soviet Union. Hence his emergence as the Commissar Liberator...
...over time, fewer and fewer Russians fit the stereotype of illiterate peasants on whose bovine passivity Czar or commissar could rely. Soviets were increasingly well educated and well informed, in spite of the propaganda poured over them. And while they reached political maturity, their leadership sank into senility. The people cringed when they heard the doddering Leonid Brezhnev try to form his words and when they learned that his hands were so shaky he had to eat with a spoon at a state dinner. They told scornful jokes: state radio, cynics said, dared not play any work by Tchaikovsky...
Yang turned to the 27th Army, normally based in Shijiazhuang, Hebei province, and largely composed of ill-educated peasant conscripts with no ties to Beijing, for the harsh job of clearing Tiananmen. The President has personal links to the 27th through his brother Yang Baibing, who is top political commissar of the P.L.A., and Chief of Staff Chi Haotian, said to be another relative...
...Paradjanov, a lyric poet in the Dovzhenko mold, spent nearly four years in prison. Andrei Tarkovsky, the greatest Soviet director since Eisenstein, filmed Andrei Rublev in 1966; the complete version was not shown publicly in the U.S.S.R. until 1987, just after Tarkovsky died in exile. Alexander Askoldov's The Commissar, filmed in 1967, was accused of "Zionist tendencies" and suppressed for 20 years; Askoldov has yet to make another movie. Erakli Kvirikadze made his satire of Stalinism, The Swimmer, in 1981, but a crucial scene was deleted until 1987. The director stashed the offending footage in his refrigerator and waited...