apparatchik
Americannoun
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apparatchiks,
plural
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apparatchiki
plural
noun
-
a member of a Communist apparat
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an official or bureaucrat in any organization
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of apparatchik
1940–45; < Russian apparátchik, equivalent to apparát apparat + -chik agent suffix
Vocabulary lists containing apparatchik
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
As a KGB operative and then an assiduous apparatchik, he avoided attention.
From BBC ● May 30, 2026
Cuba’s government is still dominated by Raúl Castro, 94 years old, the younger brother of Fidel, while President Miguel Díaz-Canel, 65, an unpopular apparatchik, runs day-to-day affairs.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 22, 2026
What, then, was this formerly shameless apparatchik attempting to rehabilitate?
From Slate ● Jun. 30, 2021
By contrast, a team apparatchik can sit in an airless office and stare at the television screen and decipher those same pitching signs.
From New York Times ● Jan. 14, 2020
Park said he lost his position as head of taekwondo training in Pyongyang in 2002, after squabbling with a midlevel apparatchik who apparently snitched on him to higher-ups in the government.
From "Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West" by Blaine Harden
In 2009, he sent an email to industry colleagues, attacking "the executive apparatchiki" who "feed off" the creativity of others "because they have none".
From The Guardian ● Apr. 11, 2013
This time it was to involve not only mid- level apparatchiki but higher cadre as well.
From Time Magazine Archive
Either man could move to the top in the months ahead, but both will have to keep an eye on a handful of ambitious apparatchiki who were elevated to positions of new authority.
From Time Magazine Archive
Other apparatchiki, like Prague Party Boss Martin Vaculik, reduced themselves to apologetic jelly, went on TV to profess support of Dub?ek and to deny past errors.
From Time Magazine Archive
Even the Komsomol hierarchy, a professional bureaucracy of some 100,000 apparatchiki, has been affected by Moscow's tightening of control.
From Time Magazine Archive
They need assistants — high-level apparatchiks and other agents for the day-to-day work of running the regime.
From Salon ● Mar. 24, 2026
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has fired a senior official tasked with economic policy and condemned "incompetent" apparatchiks for delays in the opening of an important factory, state media said Tuesday.
From Barron's ● Jan. 20, 2026
Baehr seems to believe that cultural edicts can be handed down as imperiously as judicial opinions, so a handful of well-placed apparatchiks can redirect the zeitgeist.
From Seattle Times ● Mar. 12, 2023
The USSR’s politburo, the apex of political power in which decisions of real consequence were made, was staffed by aging apparatchiks who had spent their entire lives working within this system.
From Textbooks ● Jan. 1, 2020
Rockwell, Wilson and Stephen Merchant are hilarious as various Nazi apparatchiks.
From Washington Post ● Oct. 23, 2019
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Get a wordDefinitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
