How to Use commissar in a Sentence

commissar

noun
  • The nation’s new commissars struck back in their usual way.
    — Sean Williams, Harpers Magazine, 24 Feb. 2026
  • The great shortcoming in his work, even more than its commissar aspect, is iciness.
    — Mark Feeney, BostonGlobe.com, 13 Sep. 2022
  • The 2,900-page bill would make an old Soviet commissar blush.
    — Phil Gramm and Mike Solon, WSJ, 1 Mar. 2022
  • In the Sakha Republic, one military commissar was punched in the face.
    — Sarah A. Topol, New York Times, 20 Sep. 2024
  • But his open, public embrace is a real scandal for the ideological commissars of the right.
    — Ed Kilgore, Daily Intelligencer, 10 Jan. 2018
  • Now imagine the people who know how to do this routine stuff are either thrown out of office or put under the thumbs of political commissars.
    — Zack Beauchamp, Vox, 1 Nov. 2024
  • After confronting the political commissar, he was blocked from promotions and joined the railway.
    — Los Angeles Times, 29 Sep. 2019
  • Soviet commissars may no longer trouble us, but the busybody enemies of youthful adventure abound.
    — Meghan Cox Gurdon, WSJ, 14 July 2017
  • This is the final fruit of our commissars treating personal decisions, such as whether to wear a mask amid a pandemic or whom to vote for, as being subject to their advice and consent.
    — Peter Tonguette, Washington Examiner, 12 Jan. 2024
  • Wan Minggui, a commissar in the Chinese military, says in the documentary.
    — Chris Buckley and Steven Lee Myers, New York Times, 11 Oct. 2017
  • The commissar slowly warms to the family’s generosity and decency.
    — Richard Sandomir, New York Times, 6 June 2018
  • With the Lincolns, he was elected as much as selected, said Steve Nelson, the brigade’s political commissar.
    — National Geographic, 31 July 2020
  • Say, a commissar or a member of a Theater Accountability Coalition?
    — Ron Grossman, chicagotribune.com, 22 June 2017
  • In the olden days, the authorities probably would have installed a commissar or an uniformed official of some kind to combat this problem, but nobody fights a pirate insurgency with boots on the ground any more.
    — Bruce Sterling, WIRED, 16 Nov. 2013
  • From the appointment of a party commissar to work with the chief executive, to the pulling of politically sensitive books from library shelves, Hong Kong is changing fast.
    — The Economist, 11 July 2020
  • Xu Xisheng, from China’s air force, was made political commissar, an equally senior position in charge of enforcing party directives.
    — Ellen Nakashima, Washington Post, 2 Aug. 2023
  • The commissar at the encampment is Man, the Captain and Bon’s old friend, and the Captain’s direct superior as an undercover agent.
    — Carly Tagen-Dye, Peoplemag, 27 May 2024
  • Although the ship’s political commissar declared the carrier combat ready in November, it is hamstrung by a ski-jump deck, diesel propulsion systems and limited access to overseas bases.
    — Ting Shi, Bloomberg.com, 7 July 2017
  • In July, the Rocket Force abruptly replaced its two leaders, the commander and the political commissar, with no explanation.
    — Nectar Gan, CNN, 31 Jan. 2024
  • Anatoly Lunacharsky, the first Bolshevik commissar for education, endorsed London’s work.
    — J. Hoberman, The New York Review of Books, 22 Oct. 2020
  • The skeezy old Engineer is still around, professing to have reformed, but then Thuy, who has somehow become a powerful commissar, shows up wanting to track Kim down, so the Engineer resumes pimp work.
    — Margaret Gray, Los Angeles Times, 25 July 2019
  • Officials were dismissed in waves even from the very source of repression—the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs—as new commissars arrived to replace them.
    — Andrei Kolesnikov, Foreign Affairs, 8 Sep. 2025
  • On Monday, the governor of the Khabarovsk region in the Far East said that half of the men called up there, numbering in the thousands, should not have been drafted and had been sent home and that the region’s military commissar had been dismissed.
    — Andrew E. Kramer, BostonGlobe.com, 4 Oct. 2022
  • On Monday, the governor of the Khabarovsk region in the Far East said that half of the men called up there, numbering in the thousands, should not have been drafted and had been sent home and that the region’s military commissar had been dismissed.
    — Anton Troianovski, New York Times, 3 Oct. 2022
  • The trouble is that the California Senator goes on to propose that political commissars oversee salary decisions for roughly 80 million American workers.
    — The Editorial Board, WSJ, 27 May 2019
  • Soldiers and political commissars in the army distrust one another, and the ability of wealthy and educated urbanites to buy their way out of compulsory military service has undermined the legitimacy of the armed forces and damaged the military’s public image.
    — Foreign Affairs, 16 Dec. 2025
  • Words, as the historian Thucydides warned 2,400 years ago, habitually change their meanings to reflect passing political orthodoxy — and thugs, commissars, and brownshirts oversee the charade.
    — Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 31 Aug. 2017
  • On May 11, 1942, Darquier gave the most widely circulated of France’s newspapers, Paris-Soir, his first interview as commissar general.
    — Literary Hub, 17 Feb. 2026
  • So far Kremlin commissars have threatened to wage war against two nations—Germany and South Africa—to stave off Putin’s detention, and have even provocatively warned that the headquarters of the ICC, in the Dutch city The Hague, could be blasted by Moscow’s missiles.
    — Kevin Holden Platt, Forbes.com, 7 Aug. 2025

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'commissar.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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