Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25626-20150830011559

On page 137, Truman suggests bombing certain minor cities in the East bloc in order to push the "red bosses in Warsaw and Prague and Budapest and East Berlin" away from Stalin. Implicitly, that would mean Boleslaw Beirut of Poland, Klement Gottwald of Czechoslovakia, Matays Rakosi of Hungary, and Walther Ulbricht of East Germany.

Rakosi is specifically name checked, so he will get an article, but there no direct references to the other three by name or title. However, I am going to suggest we create articles for Beirut and Gottwald, and add a section for Ulbricht (whom we already have an article on). Normally, we prefer more direct references, even a title will do if we don't get a name. For example, Vincent Auriol isn't directly named, but Truman says the "President of the French Fourth Republic" was screaming in his ear, so an Auriol page is warranted.

But the references to "bosses" is pretty broad, I know. Nonetheless, I think we should go ahead and create the pages for the following reasons:

1) Beirut and Gottwald each served as both chairman/leader of their country's respective communist parties AND concurrently served as the president of their respective countries.  So, unlike other communist states, the ambiguity of who is the real "boss" is non-existent.  Truman is almost certainly thinking of Beirut and Gottwald when he references the "bosses" in Warsaw and Prague.

Obviously, Ulbricht is a little more ambiguous. He was the general secretary of the part at this time, and Wilhelm Pieck was the actual president. But we already have an Ulbricht page, and we've created subsections on that sort of basis before.

2) HT has decided for some bizarre, unfathomable reason, to create a fictional character named Klement Gottwald, and make him part of Boris Gribkov's flight crew.  He doesn't even address the fact that this fellow, a Sudeten German no less, shares a name with the contemporary leader of Czechoslovakia.   