Commissar

Commissar is the English transliteration of an official title (комисса́р) used in Russia after the Bolshevik revolution and in the Soviet Union, as well as some other Communist countries.

It is used to distinguish the title from similar titles in a variety of languages (such as commissaire in French or kommissar in German), which are usually translated into English as commissioner.

In Russia, the title was associated with a number of administrative and military functions in the Bolshevik forces during the Russian Civil War and the Soviet government afterwards. During the war, the White Army widely used the collective term bolsheviks and commissars for their opponents.

There were two well established titles: People's Commissar (government) and political commissar (military).

The term derives from a similar term in French to describe the equivalent of the rank of Major both in the army of the ancien regime and the French revolution. Such officials were not military officers but reported back to the political authorities: the king and the National Assembly, respectively. It is the use by the French revolutionary government which gave the idea to the Russian one.

Fiction

One of Russian author Vasily Grossman's early stories, In the town of Berdichev, was made into a 1967 movie, Commissar, by the Soviet director Aleksandr Askoldov. Both tell the story of a woman commissar in a Red Army cavalry unit during the Russian Civil War, who leaves her unit when she becomes pregnant and stays with a poor tailor's family in the town of Berdichev. The movie is famous for having been heavily censored by the Soviet government's film agency Goskino, and was in fact not released until 1988.

The term Commissar is also used in the fictional world of Warhammer 40,000 to represent a political field officer in the regiments of the fictitious Imperial Guard. The Imperial Commissar, as described by many Warhammer novelists, is given complete jurisdiction to judge the actions of any trooper or officer and to act accordingly. Among miscreant soldiers, a Commissar's wrath is as frequent a cause of fatality as the enemy. An Imperial Commissar's word is immutable law and his visage is one of grim authority that is to be respected and rightly feared. The Commissar featured here can be viewed as a corruption of the original term, using the communist term in a despotic government, although both the real and fictional Commissars fulfill the identical purpose of enforcing the ideology of their society's rulers within the military "for their own good".