Word: gorodki
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...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, but he is no more lovable than any other python in repose...
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...
...Gang. On the official Politburo list (more important than gorodki scores) Zhdanov now stands fourth-after Stalin, Molotov and the hated Lavrenty Beria, head of the secret police. Of those below Zhdanov, his most serious rival is Georgi Malenkov, 44, a brilliant backstairs intriguer. Others are Anastas Mikoyan, the Armenian foreign trade chief, who enjoys Stalin's personal favor but has little party following, and a dark horse, Nikolai Bulganin, the political boss of the Army. Molotov, Beria and Malenkov are loosely grouped as the reactionary anti-Westerners. But as long as Stalin lives the whole gang will stick...
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