Definition of "apparatchik"

Whether conservatively toeing their Marx or boldly advocating such heretical Western-style reforms as the primacy of profits, every important planner, apparatchik and economist in Russia is caught up in Communism's greatest debate since Stalin set backward Russia on its cruel-but successful-forced march into the 20th century industrial world.

1965 February 12, “Russia: Borrowing from the Capitalists”, in Time‎, volume 85, archived from the original on 10 March 2009

In these dire conditions the ambitious Serbo-Croatian Communist Party apparatchik Slobodan Milošević played the national card in Kosovo.

2007, Elizabeth Roberts, Realm of the Black Mountain: A History of Montenegro, Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, page 34

Mr. Gonzales came across as a dull-witted apparatchik incapable of running one of the most important departments in the executive branch. […] He delegated responsibility for purging their ranks to an inexperienced and incompetent assistant who, if that’s possible, was even more of a plodding apparatchik.

2007 April 20, “Gonzales v. Gonzales”, in The New York Times‎

He's so outspoken, so little the Labour apparatchik, that Prime Minister Brown decides he can't send this voluble critic of Iraq invasion to sit at a UN occasion alongside George W Bush.

2011 February 27, Peter Preston, “The Unfinished Global Revolution by Mark Malloch Brown – review”, in The Observer‎

“Does France, a founder member of the EU, really want to be the country that sends the biggest battalion of far-right apparatchiks to the European parliament?” [Gabriel] Attal asked.

2024 June 7, Angelique Chrisafis, quoting Gabriel Attal, “‘You can feel a shift’: will the French be lured by Le Pen?”, in The Guardian‎