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"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."