Word: gorodki
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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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...
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