Political commissar
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A political commissar is an officer appointed by a government to oversee a unit of the military. They were first used in the Soviet Union's Red Army by Leon Trotsky, who faced the task of integrating Tsarist officers and troops into the new Red Army, while ensuring their loyalty. The political commissars were appointed by the Communist Party to military units for the purpose of direct political propaganda, and to ensure that Party decisions were implemented. In this system, each unit had a political officer who was not responsible to the normal military chain of command, but instead answered to a separate chain of command within the Communist Party. The purpose of such a system is to ensure the loyalty of army commanders, and to prevent a possible coup d'etat. The political commissar had the authority to override any decision of the military officers, and to remove them from command if necessary. Therefore, sometimes the commissar usurped the functions of a regular military commander, but that was almost never necessary — the mere presence of a commissar usually meant that military commanders would follow their directives, and the day-to-day duties of the political commissar generally involved only propaganda work and boosting the morale of the troops.
After 1942, the political officials in the army were no longer called commissars, their title becoming politruk (политру́к), an abbreviation for "political leader" and later zampolit, an abbreviation for "заместитель командира по политработе", "deputy commander for political work", the change reflecting the level of the authority: zampolit had no rights to interfere with operative orders of a commander. The position was reformed after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Now it is called "Заместитель командира по воспитательной работе", "deputy commander for educational work", but is still referred to as zampolit quite often.
During the Russian Civil War, Joseph Stalin was the political commissar of the Western Front against the White Army forces of Baron Wrangel. Nikita Khrushchev was a political commissar at the Battle of Stalingrad and was the senior political officer in the south of the Soviet Union throughout the Great Patriotic War.
On November 8, 1975, the Soviet Navy frigate Storozhevoy mutinied, which at the time the West believed was an attempt to defect from Latvia to the Swedish island of Gotland. The mutiny was led by the ship's political officer, Captain Valery Sablin.
[edit] Military of China
The position of political commissar has also existed and still exists in the People's Liberation Army of China. Usually, the political commissar is a uniformed military officer, although this position has been used to give civilian party officials some experience with the military. The political commissar was head of a party cell within the military; however, military membership in the party has been restricted to the lower ranks since the 1980s. Today the political commissar is largely responsible for administrative tasks such as civilian relations, counseling and sometimes serve as second-in-command.
[edit] Fiction
In the Discworld novel Monstrous Regiment, 'Corporal' Strappi is a 'political,' an officer inserted into the rank-and-file in order to ferret out dissention in the ranks.
In the universe of Warhammer 40,000, Commissars are a special officer of the Imperial Guard, designed to unify disjointed Imperial forces. Some of the most famous Commissars are Commissar Yarrick, Saviour of Armageddon, Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt, character in the Gaunt's Ghosts series of novels by Dan Abnett and Commissar Ciaphas Cain, character in the series of novels by Sandy Mitchell.
In Tom Clancy's novel The Hunt for Red October and the film based upon it, the captain of a Soviet nuclear submarine wishes to defect to the United States. He kills the Political Commissar aboard his vessel first to facilitate the defection.
