MY UNCLE JOSEPH STALIN (235 pp )-Budu Svanidze—Putnam ($3).
When Budu Svanidze told his mother he wanted to be like his Uncle Sosso when he grew up, she slapped his little face. Uncle Sosso lived in the Caucasian Mountains and spent most of his time robbing and killing Russian soldiers and policemen. Since his home town of Didi-Lilo was a two-by-four hotbed of Georgian nationalism, this made Uncle Sosso rather popular with most townsfolk. But when Budu’s mother remembered how Sosso had been sent to an Orthodox seminary to be trained for the church, and how he had subsequently turned so shamelessly irreligious as to live openly with his sweetheart, she gave Budu a second slap and added: “This is for your Uncle Sosso!”
The world has since come to know Budu’s Uncle Sosso as Joseph Stalin, but scarcely to know him as a person. This is the gap which Budu Svanidze, 57, tries to fill from family stories and his own recollections. Nowadays, Author Svanidze lives in France. But for a long time, as an economist working on the official Soviet Encyclopedia and later as a treasury bureaucrat, he could, he says, run in to see Stalin whenever he felt like it. By way of self-explanation, Budu says that he jumped the reservation in 1945, while stationed in Vienna, in order to marry a Hungarian Roman Catholic girl.
Budu, however, does not write as a political fugitive; indeed, he seems to be more interested in collecting royalties than in grinding political axes of any kind. Artless, candid, at times 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.”
Only Kliment Voroshilov, whom Stalin always calls Klim, regularly ribs back. Budu once heard him tell Stalin a story that was going the party rounds about a proposed monument to Pushkin: “Several sculptors submitted drawings . . . The one Stalin picked showed a massive statue of Stalin holding a book on which was carved in small letters: ‘Pushkin’s Poems.’ ” Stalin laughed first, loud & long.
“I’m a Peasant.” Though Stalin loves to quiz his associates on Marx and party history, he distrusts intellectuals, says Author Svanidze. Speaking to one about his grape orchard in the Caucasus, Stalin said: “That orchard was watered with my sweat! You can’t understand that, you intellectual anarchist! I’m a peasant by birth . . . and a gardener and wine grower on top of that. It’s a race apart. It’s the best race to run a country.”
In fact, says Budu, Stalin thinks of himself as a dyed-in-the-wool conservative. He married his first wife (Budu’s Aunt Keke) in church to please his mother. When a friend felt that Stalin was spanking his son Vassily (now air commander of the Moscow military district) too severely, Stalin retorted: “I’m the father of this little brat and . . . he’s going to be brought up in the Georgian fashion. I’m not going to have him turn into a ruffian—like the sons of most of our high officials!”
He is also something of a stickler for patriotic traditions. On a wall in one room of his Gorinka estate, about 25 miles outside of Moscow, hangs a pink marble plaque which reads: “Emperor Alexander I, the Blessed Czar of all the Russias, danced in this room after having defeated the armies of Bonaparte in the Patriotic War.” When his second wife tried to rip it down, Stalin said: “I’m a Georgian, so I must show great respect for all the relics of Russian history.” One Bolshevik relic, the embalmed body of Lenin, is now a fake, says Budu. When the real body began to deteriorate rapidly at the beginning of World War II, Stalin was afraid the people would “take it as a bad sign.” A perfect likeness was made and Lenin’s body was cremated, the ashes placed in an urn and submerged in the Volga near his birthplace.
“Trotsky Hated Us.” Stalin rationalized the great purges of ’37 and ’38 to Budu as simply part of a moral cleanup. “The French Revolution collapsed because of the degeneration of the morals of its leaders, who surrounded themselves with loose women.” Trotsky, he said, was “not corrupt . . . but he carries within himself another danger that a popular revolution can’t tolerate: he’s an individualist to his fingertips, a hater of the masses … He hated us and he despised us . . .”
Never in really good health since 1936, Stalin had a bad heart attack at Potsdam, Budu says. In addition, he suffers from asthma and insomnia. He was in a state of collapse after the Yalta Conference, where, says Budu again, the “Churchill-Stalin vodka-drinking duel had been bad for him.” “I’m younger than Churchill,” he said, “and I don’t admit his superiority even in the matter of how much alcohol we can take.” From about that time, Budu implies, the Soviet Union has been run pretty much by the Molotov-Malenkov axis, even though Stalin used to complain that “Molotov is no good at ending arguments, only at starting them . . . Sometimes he is really unbearable.”
The long arm of Uncle Sosso still throws enough of a scare into Budu to keep him changing residences frequently. At present he is living on the outskirts of Paris, under an assumed name. Seven years of Western freedom have given him a more critical slant on the Stalinist regime, and he is busy on a gloves-off treatment of Uncle Sosso, to be called Stalin Told Me.
*Catherine the Great’s general, who won crushing victories over the Turks and the Poles, and in 1799, in the reign of Czar Paul, drove the French armies out of Italy for a while.
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