Word: commissars
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...factory clerk, meagerly educated, joined the Bolsheviks in 1917, fought in Siberia. Afterwards turned bureaucrat-businessman. 1922, chief od Russia's largest electrical equipment plant; 1931, Mayor of Moscow; 1938, chairman of GOSBANK (Russia's Federal Reserve). In 1941, doffed his business suit, became political commissar of the armies defending Moscow, full general 1944, marshal 1947, but is primarily politician bossing army professionals. Politburo member, 1948. Small, neatly dressed, goateed, mild in manner and tone. Married a girl who worked in his electrical factory; no children, lives modestly. Travel outside the Iron Curtain: none...
...appropriations member of the Caucasian Bolshevik Bureau, i.e., he directed "fighting squads" which robbed banks, public treasuries, steamships. His biggest haul: a quarter of a million rubles in a stickup in the main square of Tiflis. Among those arrested as a result of this raid was Litvinov, future Commissar for Foreign Affairs, who was trying to dispose of the loot in Paris. Koba, although on the police "wanted" list, managed to keep in the background. He was a terrorist, but a terrorist who operated through committees. This was caution; none ever questioned his personal courage...
Save the Scum. Last week Premier Otto Grotewohl appointed what West Berliners promptly labeled a "commissar for the prevention of flights"; to fill the job he dipped into the Communist penalty box and came up with Gerhart Eisler, the shifty little Comintern agent who recently lost his job as East German propaganda chief, and was presumed on the way out. He explained his long absence from the political arena without a smile: "I had to have my teeth repaired." Then he turned to the refugees. They were all "underworld characters, trash proletarians, black marketeers and scum . . ." but anyway, Eisler...
Died. Lev Zakharovich Mekhlis, 64, one of two Jews* holding top-ranking posts in the U.S.S.R.; reportedly of a heart attack. A longtime Stalin favorite, he was a veteran revolutionist, editor of Pravda, vice-commissar of defense, and army political commissar. As Commissar of State Control, Mekhlis was wartime production boss (he directed the evacuation of industry to the east) and chief inspector of the Soviet economy until illness forced his retirement in 1950. Red leaders, busy at their purge of Jews, announced to the world their "profound grief " at Mekhlis' death and staged an elaborate state funeral...
Guerrilla. In World War II, Khrushchev took charge of the mass guerrilla movement that scorched the black earth of the Ukraine in the Wehrmacht's rear, won the Stalingrad Medal for his services as a political commissar. At war's end he went back to the war-charred Ukraine with orders from the Kremlin to 1) revive its agriculture and heavy industry; 2) liquidate the Ukrainians who had collaborated with the Nazis. He succeeded on both counts. "Half the leading workers have been done away with," he boasted...