Word: papochka
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...Svetlana remembered her papochka, Stalin was tender with her in her early childhood, bestowing "loud moist kisses" and calling her "little sparrow." But as she reached adolescence, he became incensed by her independent spirit. He berated her for the "insolence" on her face. He made a scene when he found her wearing a tight sweater. He hated the sight of her in short skirts and made her wear hers much longer than other schoolgirls did. When he learned that she had a lover, he slapped her twice across the face...
Still, one significant change had taken place in her. Sovietologist Leopold Labedz, who met her in 1968, first noticed it in 1981: "She was getting soft on papochka." Once she had acknowledged Stalin's personal responsibility for the death of millions; now she called him a prisoner of Communist ideology. Her new book contained hardly any criticism of her father. She probably felt she had betrayed him. "My father would have shot me for what I have done," she often said during her final year in Britain...
...Iosifovna Stalina was always the apple of her father's eye-but what an eye it was! Her dad was Iosif Stalin, and Svetlana was among the very few to whom he ever showed any real tenderness. In notes to her, full of fatherly affection, Stalin signed himself "Papochka" (little daddy). Even though he objected to her choice of a husband in 1951, the Soviet dictator staged a $500,000 czarist-style marriage feast that went on for two weeks, and was kept afloat by gallons of pink Crimean champagne, sweet Armenian brandy and vodka. But, after Stalin died...
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