Encyclopedia > Political officer

  Article Content

Political officer

A political officer or zampolit was a system originally designed by Leon Trotsky for the Red Army and was borrowed by many other Soviet-influenced armies, notably the People's Liberation Army.

In this system, each unit has a political officer who is not responsible to the normal military chain of command, but instead is answers to a separate chain of command which is controlled by the Communist Party. The purpose of the system is to ensure political loyality and to prevent the military from acting independently and perhaps stage a coup d'etat.



All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

 
  Search Encyclopedia

Search over one million articles, find something about almost anything!
 
 
  
  Featured Article
Brazil

... slowed considerably in 2001 - to less than 2% - because of a slowdown in major markets and the hiking of interest rates by the Central Bank to combat inflationary ...

 
 
 
This page was created in 35.9 ms