Commissar
military political officer in Communist countries
Commissar (or sometimes Kommissar) is an English transliteration of the Russian комиссáр (komissar), which means 'commissary'. In English, the transliteration commissar often refers specifically to the political commissars of Soviet and Eastern-bloc armies or to the people's commissars (effectively government ministers), while administrative officers are called commissaries.
The Russian word комисса́р, from French commissaire, was used in Russia for both political and administrative officials. The title has been used in the Soviet Union and in Russia since the time of the emperor Peter the Great (r. 1682–1725).
History
In the 18th and 19th centuries in the Russian army kommissars, then krigs-komissars (from German: Krieg 'war') were officials in charge of supply for the armed forces (see Rus. Генерал-кригскомиссар).
Commissaries were used during the Provisional Government (March–July 1917) for regional heads of administration, but the term commissar is associated with a number of Cheka and military functions in Bolshevik and Soviet government military forces during the Russian Civil War (the White Army widely used the collective term "bolsheviks and commissars" for their opponents) and with the later terms People's Commissar (or narkom) for government ministers and political commissar in the military.
Variants
People's Commissar
A People's Commissar (informally abbreviated narkom) was a government official serving in a Council of People's Commissars. This title was first used by the Russian SFSR (out of dislike for the tsarist and bourgeois term minister) and then copied among the many Soviet and Bolshevik-controlled states in the Russian Civil War.
The government departments headed by a People's Commissar were called People's Commissariat (informally abbreviated narkomat).
“Commissar” enters the record as military political officer in Communist countries. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Commissar, military and political can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Commissar” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Commissar, military and political provides the most credible route into that argument.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4229607. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1682, 1725 and 1917.
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This entry incorporates text from “Commissar” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.