Word: koba
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Friend Koba. Even if bitter-memoried Tito had not made plain his dislike of Molotov, it was time for Old Stone Bottom to go. It was 50 years since he joined the Bolshevik party (as a boy of 16), and though he might now see the need for new methods, his name was too closely associated with that of Stalin to be the one to make them. His parents had been respectable people from the Volga region named Scriabin, related to the composer. Young Vyacheslav Mikhailovich ingratiated himself with the Bolsheviks by persuading a wealthy young bourgeois friend to finance...
Among the few people close enough to the late Dictator Stalin to address him by his nickname "Koba" was a fellow Georgian, Sergo Ordzhonikidze (rhymes roughly with poor-Johnny-kids-me), an oldtime Bolshevik who had risen to be top commissar of heavy industry. One day in 1936, during what Russians now call the Ezhovshchina (the purge which carried off some 7,000,000 Russians to Siberian prison camps and mass graves), Ordzhonikidze learned that his precious engineers were being arrested. Victor (1 Chose Freedom) Kravchenko, a minor executive of the Commissariat, later told of Ordzhoni-kidze's telephone...
...Koba," he yelled, "why do you let the NKVD arrest my men without informing...
Then, as Stalin tried to reply, Ordzhonikidze cut him short: "I demand that this authoritarianism cease! I'm still a member of the Politburo! I'm going to raise hell, Koba, if it's the last thing I do before...
Mass Leader. Czarist rule toughened. Koba spent a total of seven of the next ten years in prison. During periods of freedom he organized the oil workers in Baku which, he afterwards said, "hardened me as a practical fighter ... I first learned what it means to lead masses of workers." He began using the name Stalin (Man of Steel...