Vyacheslav Molotov

• 1. Introduction

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  Vyacheslav Molotov was the only person in the twentieth century to have shaken hands with Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Adolf Hitler, Rudolf Hess, Hermann Göring, and Heinrich Himmler. That single fact tells you something about the man: he endured. While nearly every figure around him was shot, purged, exiled, or disgraced, Molotov kept signing, kept negotiating, kept surviving. He was born Vyacheslav Skryabin in a merchant's village in Vyatka Governorate in 1890. He died in Moscow in 1986, at the age of ninety-six, having outlived the leader he served, the system he built, and nearly everyone who knew him personally.

  His name became a household word not for his decades at the summit of Soviet power, but for an improvised firebomb invented by his Finnish enemies. His signature appeared on more documented execution orders than any other Soviet official, including Stalin himself. And yet he ended his life quietly seeking readmission to the Communist Party, unrepentant, still insisting the purges had been correct.

  How does a shy, quiet boy from a provincial merchant family become the second most powerful figure in the Soviet Union? What does it mean to stand beside history's most catastrophic decisions and call them necessary? And what do you do with a man who outlives his own century? The answers reach from a revolutionary newspaper office in St. Petersburg to a failed coup in Moscow, from a famine that killed millions to a firebomb named in bitter mockery.

• 2. From Skryabin to Molotov

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  Classmates and acquaintances in his early years described young Vyacheslav Skryabin as "shy" and "quiet," always helping his father with the family merchant business. He was educated at a secondary school in Kazan, and it was there that he became friends with Aleksandr Arosev, a fellow future revolutionary. By 1906, Skryabin had joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, gravitating quickly toward its radical Bolshevik faction under Vladimir Lenin.

  The pseudonym he chose says everything about the identity he was constructing. He took the name Molotov from the Russian word molot, meaning sledgehammer, because he believed it carried an industrial and proletarian sound. In 1909, he was arrested and spent two years in exile in Vologda. In 1911, he enrolled at St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute and joined the editorial staff of the new underground Bolshevik newspaper Pravda, where he met Joseph Stalin for the first time. That first meeting did not immediately produce a close political bond.

  In 1914, he moved from St. Petersburg to Moscow at the outbreak of the First World War. The following year, he was arrested again and this time deported to Irkutsk, in eastern Siberia. In 1916, he escaped and returned to the capital, which had been renamed Petrograd. He joined the Bolshevik committee there, and when the February Revolution of 1917 arrived, he was one of very few Bolsheviks of any standing in the city. He directed Pravda to take a sharp leftward line against the Provisional Government. Stalin arrived and reversed that line. Lenin arrived and overruled Stalin. Through it all, Molotov fastened himself to Stalin, the alliance that would define everything that followed.

• 3. The Iron Arse in Power

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  Leon Trotsky called Molotov "mediocrity personified." Molotov pedantically corrected colleagues who called him "Stone Arse" by noting that Lenin had actually used the phrase "Iron Arse." That habit of precise correction under mockery captures something real about him. The outward dullness was a mask over what the minor communist official Alexander Barmine described, on visiting Molotov near the Kremlin, as "a large and placid face, the face of an ordinary, uninspired, but rather soft and kindly bureaucrat, attentive and unassuming."

  Lenin recalled Molotov to Moscow in 1921, elevated him to full membership of the Central Committee and the Orgburo, and gave him charge of the party secretariat. Yet Lenin also criticised him for what he called "shameful bureaucratism" and "stupid behaviour." In 1922, Stalin became General Secretary and Molotov became the de facto Second Secretary. He became a full member of the Politburo in January 1926. During the power struggles following Lenin's death in 1924, he remained a consistent Stalin loyalist against Trotsky, then against Kamenev and Zinoviev, then against Bukharin.

  On the 23rd of February 1929, addressing a Moscow communist party conference, Molotov argued that the Soviet Union faced permanent, imminent danger of attack and required the most rapid possible growth of industry. With the right wing of the party, led by Bukharin and Rykov, defeated over the pace of industrialisation, Molotov emerged as the second most powerful figure in the Soviet state. At the Central Committee plenum of the 19th of December 1930, he succeeded Alexey Rykov as Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, the Soviet equivalent of a head of government. The US journalist John Gunther reported in 1938 that Molotov was a vegetarian and teetotaller, though the Yugoslav official Milovan Djilas, who attended banquets with him, claimed otherwise.

• 4. Famine, Purges, Lists

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  At the Central Committee plenum of 10-the 17th of November 1929, Molotov was the main speaker when the decision was made to replace thousands of small peasant farms with collective agriculture. He warned officials to treat the kulak, the landowning peasant, as "the most cunning and still undefeated enemy." In the four years that followed, millions were forcibly moved onto special settlements for forced labour. In 1931 alone, almost two million were deported. Molotov told the Congress of Soviets that year: "We have never refuted the fact that healthy prisoners capable of normal labour are used for road building and other public works. This is good for society; it is also good for the peasants themselves."

  The famine that resulted from the disruption of agricultural output and the drive to export grain killed an estimated eleven million people. In September 1931, despite the famine, Molotov sent a secret telegram to communist leaders in the North Caucasus complaining that grain collection for export was going "disgustingly slowly." In December, he travelled to Kharkiv, then the capital of Ukraine, and ignored local warnings about the grain shortage, blaming officials for incompetence. He returned to Kharkiv in July 1932 with Lazar Kaganovich and declared there would be no concessions in the grain export targets. On the 25th of July, the two men sent a secret telegram ordering the Ukrainian leadership to intensify collection. In 2010, a Kyiv Court of Appeal found Molotov and Kaganovich guilty of genocide against the Ukrainian people.

  During the Great Purge, Molotov approved three hundred and seventy-two documented execution lists, more than any other Soviet official, including Stalin. In 1938 alone, twenty out of twenty-eight People's Commissars in his government were executed. After his deputy Rudzutak was arrested, Molotov visited him in prison. Rudzutak told him he had been badly beaten and tortured. Molotov did not intervene. His old friend from his exile in Vologda, Aleksandr Arosev, tried to reach him by telephone three times in 1937, fearing arrest. Molotov refused to take the calls. Arosev was arrested and shot. In the 1950s, Molotov gave Arosev's daughter signed copies of her father's books, and later wished he had kept them. As one account put it, it appeared to be the loss of the books, not the loss of his friend, that Molotov continued to regret.

• 5. The Pact and the War

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  In May 1939, Maxim Litvinov was dismissed as People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs. The author Maurice Hindus wrote in 1954 that it was well known in Moscow that Molotov had always detested Litvinov, resenting his fluency in French, German and English, and distrusting his easy manner with foreigners. Litvinov, for his part, regarded Molotov as a small-minded intriguer. Molotov was appointed to replace him, chosen in part because replacing a Jewish predecessor with a non-Jew would signal Moscow's openness to deal with Nazi Germany.

  A trade agreement was concluded on the 18th of August 1939. On the 22nd of August, German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop flew to Moscow to finalise a non-aggression treaty. Though the treaty carried both their names, it was Stalin and Hitler who determined its content. The secret protocol within the pact arranged for the partition of Poland, Finland, and the Baltic states between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and for the Soviet annexation of Bessarabia. The protocol gave Hitler authorisation to invade Poland on the 1st of September.

  On the 5th of March 1940, Lavrentiy Beria gave Molotov and three other Soviet leaders a note proposing the execution of twenty-five thousand seven hundred Polish anti-Soviet officers, the event now known as the Katyn massacre. In November 1940, Stalin sent Molotov to Berlin to meet Ribbentrop and Hitler. In June 1941, when Hitler turned east and invaded the Soviet Union, it was Molotov, not Stalin, who broadcast the news to the Soviet people by radio on the 22nd of June.

  Molotov then flew secretly to Scotland on a high-altitude Tupolev TB-7 bomber over German-occupied Denmark and the North Sea, was greeted by British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, and took a train to London to discuss a second front. After signing the Anglo-Soviet Treaty of 1942 on the 26th of May, he flew to Washington to meet President Franklin D. Roosevelt and agree a lend-lease arrangement. On his return flight to the Soviet Union, his plane was attacked first by German fighters and then mistakenly by Soviet ones.

• 6. Falling From Favour

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  Stalin's feelings about Molotov were complicated. In 1942, Stalin cabled him directly on the 3rd of June with a detailed rebuke, complaining about the "terseness and reticence" of his reports from negotiations with Roosevelt and Churchill, accusing him of conveying only what he himself considered important. Stalin's one-time bodyguard, known as Amba, wrote that Stalin joined in the general dislike of Molotov among the Soviet leadership, and yet could not stop relying on him.

  When Beria informed Stalin of the importance of the Manhattan Project, Stalin handpicked Molotov to lead the Soviet atomic bomb effort. Development under Molotov moved slowly. On the advice of physicist Igor Kurchatov, he was replaced by Beria in 1944. When President Harry S. Truman told Stalin that the United States had created an unprecedented weapon, Stalin passed the conversation to Molotov and ordered him to accelerate the programme.

  At the 19th Party Congress in 1952, Molotov was not listed among members of the newly established Bureau of the Presidium, a clear sign he had lost Stalin's favour. Stalin told Beria, Khrushchev, Malenkov and Bulganin that he no longer wanted to see Molotov. Stalin's daughter later confirmed that Stalin considered Molotov a potential successor, which was precisely why he planned to have him eliminated. Stalin's death in March 1953 likely saved Molotov's life. Georgy Malenkov reappointed Molotov as Foreign Minister on the 5th of March 1953, and a ruling troika of Malenkov, Beria and Molotov took shape briefly before Molotov and Malenkov moved against Beria.

  A pivotal blow to his household came in December 1948, when his wife Polina Zhemchuzhina was arrested for "treason." Molotov initially abstained from the vote to condemn her, but later recanted publicly, calling her ties to anti-Soviet Jewish nationalists a "heavy sense of remorse" on his part, and divorced her. She spent years in the Lubyanka, then in exile in Kazakhstan. Molotov received only scattered news about her from Beria, whom he loathed. He reportedly ordered his maids to lay dinner for two every evening, to remind himself, in his own words, that "she suffered because of me." She was freed immediately after Stalin's death.

• 7. Exile and Survival

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  Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin at the 20th Party Congress in February 1956 set the clock running on Molotov's remaining time in power. As the most senior of Stalin's collaborators still in government, Molotov became the natural figurehead for old-guard resistance. In June 1956, he was removed as Foreign Minister. He joined a faction that mounted a vote in the Presidium, winning 7-4 to remove Khrushchev as First Secretary. Khrushchev refused to step down without a Central Committee plenum. The plenum met from the 22nd to the 29th of June 1957, and Molotov's faction was defeated. He was made ambassador to the Mongolian People's Republic. His group was denounced as "the Anti-Party Group."

  In 1960, he was appointed Soviet representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency, a partial rehabilitation. After the 22nd Party Congress in 1961, Khrushchev's de-Stalinisation campaign, which included removing Stalin's body from Lenin's Mausoleum, led to Molotov and Kaganovich being expelled from the Communist Party. In 1962, all of Molotov's party documents and files were destroyed by the authorities. He suffered a heart attack in January 1962 and retired.

  In retirement, Molotov remained, by his own account, unrepentant. He defended the purges as a necessary measure to avoid Soviet defeat in the Second World War, acknowledging "grave mistakes and excesses" while insisting "the policy on the whole was correct." He denied until the end that the secret territorial protocol in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had ever existed, a denial the Soviet Congress of People's Deputies formally reversed in 1989. He was hospitalised in Kuntsevo Hospital in Moscow in June 1986 and died there on the 8th of November 1986, during Mikhail Gorbachev's rule, at the age of ninety-six. He was the last surviving major participant in the events of 1917. He was buried in Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow. A collection of interviews he gave between 1969 and 1986 was published in 1993 by Felix Chuev as Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics.

• 8. Name and Legacy

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  Winston Churchill, who met Molotov repeatedly during the war, called him a "man of outstanding ability and cold-blooded ruthlessness" and wrote that the great diplomatic minds of earlier centuries, Mazarin, Talleyrand and Metternich, "would welcome him to their company, if there be another world to which Bolsheviks allow themselves to go." The former US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles said he had never witnessed diplomatic skill at such a high degree of perfection as Molotov's.

  The term "Molotov cocktail" was coined by the Finns during the Winter War. When Soviet aircraft dropped incendiaries on Finnish civilians, troops and fortifications, Molotov claimed on radio that the planes were not bombing but delivering food to starving Finns. The Finns named the air bombs "Molotov bread baskets" and responded by attacking Soviet tanks with improvised firebombs they called Molotov cocktails, "a drink to go with the food." The historian Simon Sebag-Montefiore noted it was one aspect of Molotov's unintended cult of personality that the vain premier surely did not appreciate.

  Michael Palin was cast as Molotov in the 2017 satire film The Death of Stalin, a choice that suggests how far Molotov's image had passed into the territory of dark absurdity. In 1984, two years before his death, Molotov was permitted to apply for readmission to the Communist Party. Lazar Kaganovich, the other Old Bolshevik who had stood beside him signing execution orders and grain-collection telegrams, would live until 1991, long enough to see the Soviet Union begin its collapse.