Word: opportunist
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Pale, plain, 30-year-old Ralph Kastner did not have much use for his father. Socially and politically, father Hermann was an opportunist. After Ralph's mother had divorced him in 1944, father Hermann managed a retrial which declared his wife guilty, hounded her and their daughter out of Dresden. When he married again, Hermann chose blowzy, peroxide-blonde Trude Mirtsching, a stenographer with excellent Soviet connections. A year later, conniving Hermann had worked up from a minor political boss to be Deputy Chairman of the Economic Commission, forerunner of the East German government...
Most striking was the complete disappearance of N. A. Voznesensky, an amiable younger member of the Politburo, in charge of five-year planning. Voznesensky, something of an opportunist, had switched from Malenkov's camp to Zhdanov's. In March 1949 Voznesensky was fired. For a while, slighting and insulting references to him appeared in the Russian press. After that, it was as if Voznesensky had never been. For example, a recently published popular Soviet history book omits his name from a wartime list of Politburo members. George Orwell's "Ministry of Truth," which rewrote history to suit...
...little allegory is generally clear enough. The Governor, so sure that the "masses" want someone to worship and not to be told "that it is their duty to think," evilly overreaches himself. But poky liberalism gets caught in the middle, as usual, and goes down, leaving the opportunist Minister for Public Instruction in doubtful control as civil war begins. Only the Governor's passively Christlike brother, a concentration-camp veteran, and his simple peasant wife are left free to face the evil with an armament of unselfish love...