The other type was the political commissars (or "politruks"). This was a type of army officer, originally used to help keep Red Army units loyal during the Civil War, and then reestablished for ensuring the army's loyalty during the Stalin era (in the 1930s). The commissar's principal responsibility was effectively to act as a link between the party and the army, as well as boosting the morale of the men as a counselor and
organizing ideological activities and basic political education courses for the troops. (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politruk) The USSR permanently retained this type of commissar, and still had thousands of poltical commissars in the 1980s, although
the commissar's initial authority to act as an "alternative commander" and give his own separate orders was eliminated in 1942; the political officers were formally renamed and no longer addressed as commissars (the new replacement term was "zampolit" -- an abbreviation standing for "deputy commander for political work"; the umbrella term "politruk" -- an abbreviation simply standing for "political leader" was also used before and after the 1942 changes).
From Stalin's time and onward, the Red Army's political commissars were assigned to their own type of hierarchy (later in the war they were actually given corresponding military ranks, from lieutenant to general). The highest-ranking political commissars were responsible for the political education of entire armies and essentially had a rank equal to that of the Red Army generals -- thus men like Khrushchev and Bulganin ended up with the rank of general, although the
operational decisions were made by career army officers like Zhukov, etc. As a matter of course, the highest-ranked of the army's commissars were the high-ranking Party members -- some even members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.
At the same time, a lot of the lower-level political officers ('commisars') who went off to war in 1941 were guys in their 20s. Naturally, many of them were recent party members. (Even though experienced people with solid party backgrounds were naturally preferable for this type of work, but the only real requirement for the job was being a highly dedicated and loyal communist.)
For instance, the legendary WWII partisan Nikolay Kiselyov (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolay...evich_Kiselyov) was made a commissar straight out of college, and many of the junior-level commissars were just your regular rank-and-file Communists in good standing.
My great-grandfather, who'd worked as a Marxist political science instructor at a vocational school in eastern Poland / western Belarus for a bit, but hadn't been a Communist party official, volunteered for the Red Army in 1941 and was assigned as a political officer to a tank brigade.
It was a pretty dangerous job on the Eastern Front: Hitler gave the infamous Commissar Order (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commissar_Order), which stipulated that any commissar who fell into German captivity was to be shot on the spot. The casualties among them in battle were pretty high.
Although sometimes used in other contexts (e.g., an authoritative Soviet writer on drama or literature could be labelled a "cultural commissar" by anti-Communist western sources), the term "commissar" isn't applicable to other areas. There were no "commissars" in workplaces or offices or anywhere else outside the Cabinet positions and the army structure.