Word: kashtanka
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...report an odd linguistic controversy about the proper affectionate and intimate variation of the name Svetlana in Russian. Nikita Khrushchev says Stalin called his daughter Svetlanka. But in Russian the ending nka is usually used in talking to pets, as in Anton Chekhov's story about the dog Kashtanka. Stalin's daughter says her father always called her Svetochka. Since Stalin, the author of Marxism and Linguistics, fancied himself an expert on the Russian language, as on everything else, it still may be hard to argue with...
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