Word: turkestan
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...renamed Chkalov in honor of the famed Soviet flyer who in 1937 hopped over the North Pole to the U.S.* His father was presumably a Cossack subaltern. Orenburg, on the southern flank of the Urals, where Europe meets Asia, was in those days a terminal for camel caravans from Turkestan. It also had the reputation of being a restless, independent place. The Cossacks and peasants of the Orenburg region had mounted one of the most troublesome popular uprisings of the 18th Century against Catherine the Great, an event made memorable for all Russians in Pushkin's The Captain...
...assigned as politruk, i.e., political commissar, to a Red army battalion. He was an effective indoctrinator, kept a keen check on the loyalty of his men. Within three years he moved up to be commissar for a regiment, then for a brigade, and finally for the whole "Eastern and Turkestan Fronts...