--- Mike Ballard <swillsqueal at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
>
> My understanding is that he liked this one, "A dog
> returns to his vomit." He
> didn't invent it though. I suspect a lot of the
> things attributed to Koba
> were actually bits of and riffs off fokloric wisdom
> which were in wide
> circulation during his life.
>
> Maybe Chris can throw more light on this.
>
I'm under the impression that the Vozhd drew a great deal on the lingo and culture of his Georgian upbringing in Gori. There must be a ton written about this in Georgia -- too bad I don't know the language! Sergo Beria's book on his father goes into great lengths on the subject of Georgian culture in the contexts of Stalin and Beria pere -- I think I'll take a look in it when I get home. The pseudonym "Koba" of course is taken from a Georgian book. Stalin got his start as a teenager after all, oddly enough, in Georgian romantic nationalist circles. BTW though Stalin's mother was Georgian, his father was supposedly an Ossetian (hence Mandelstam's line about the "broad-chested Ossete), making both him and Beria members of ethnic minorities in Georgia, Beria not strictly speaking being Georgian but Mingrelian. Djugashvili is an Ossetian name that has been Georgianized -- there is a huge number of people with that name down in that part of the world, including of course Stalin's descendants.
FWIW it's common for anti-Communist Russians to argue that the "style" of the rule of Stalin, "that Asiatic," as Lenin once called him in anger, was influenced by Georgian and more broadly Caucasian cultural traditions of blood feud, vendetta killing, honorable banditry and obssession with personal honor. I think there may be something to this.
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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