Word: budu
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...When Budu Svanidze told his mother he wanted to be like his Uncle Sosso when he grew up, she slapped his little face. Uncle Sosso lived in the Caucasian Mountains and spent most of his time robbing and killing Russian soldiers and policemen. Since his home town of Didi-Lilo was a two-by-four hotbed of Georgian nationalism, this made Uncle Sosso rather popular with most townsfolk. But when Budu's mother remembered how Sosso had been sent to an Orthodox seminary to be trained for the church, and how he had subsequently turned so shamelessly irreligious...
...world has since come to know Budu's Uncle Sosso as Joseph Stalin, but scarcely to know him as a person. This is the gap which Budu Svanidze, 57, tries to fill from family stories and his own recollections. Nowadays, Author Svanidze lives in France. But for a long time, as an economist working on the official Soviet Encyclopedia and later as a treasury bureaucrat, he could, he says, run in to see Stalin whenever he felt like it. By way of self-explanation, Budu says that he jumped the reservation in 1945, while stationed in Vienna, in order...
...Budu, however, does not write as a political fugitive; indeed, he seems to be more interested in collecting royalties than in grinding political axes of any kind. Artless, candid, at times naive, he pictures a Stalin who dotes on Balzac novels, Turkish coffee and the color orange (he even has his watering cans painted that color), who hauls out pictures of his young son as fast as any bourgeois dad, warbles a passable tenor, and plays a sharp game of gorodki (a Russian mixture of shuffleboard and ninepins). Budu's Stalin is more human than the headlines he makes...
When in good spirits, as nephew Budu tells it, Stalin ribs the comrades unmercifully. "Viatcheslav Mikhailovitch," he yelled at Molotov during one gorodki game, "you hold the stick like an old woman with a broom!" Sputtered Molotov: "I'd like to see you try to play gorodki with glasses on!" Watching Budenny, the handle-bar-mustached old cavalryman, swig vodka at dinner, Stalin joshed: "Our Marshal goes through the vodka like Suvarov.* Too bad he doesn't resemble Suvarov in other ways...
Only Kliment Voroshilov, whom Stalin always calls Klim, regularly ribs back. Budu once heard him tell Stalin a story that was going the party rounds about a proposed monument to Pushkin: "Several sculptors submitted drawings . . . The one Stalin picked showed a massive statue of Stalin holding a book on which was carved in small letters: 'Pushkin's Poems.' " Stalin laughed first, loud & long...