Molotov, Vyacheslav

Molotov, Vyacheslav (1890–1986),a Bolshevik since before the fall of the imperial monarchy, who rose to high office in Lenin's party in the 1920s, Molotov was People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs for the USSR throughout the Second World War. He had proved himself a ruthless local official in the Civil War, associating himself with the group surrounding Stalin. In 1930 he was appointed as governmental premier, or chairman of Sovnarkom (see USSR, 3) a post he held until May 1941. His record of support for Stalin in the 1930s was unequivocal, and he distinguished himself by bloodthirsty confirmations of sentences of death passed on purge victims.

His appointment as People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs in place of Litvinov in the summer of 1939 was rightly taken by Hitler as a signal that Stalin's orientation was towards a deal with Germany rather than with the UK and France. Under the direction of Stalin, who had simultaneously assumed the chairmanship of Sovnarkom, Molotov conducted rapid, decisive negotiations with Ribbentrop; and in August 1939 the two foreign ministers signed the Nazi–Soviet Pact. As foreign minister, Molotov had a grumpy and unaccommodating style which mystified his diplomatic interlocutors. Yet his family background—he came from a well-to-do family and the composer Alexander Skriabin was his uncle—gave him insight into the ways and attitudes of the foreign embassies. Working closely with Stalin in the state committee of defence, Molotov was a competent and demanding minister.

In public reputation, he had become the second most powerful figure in the Soviet political hierarchy by 1941. He was no less shaken by the German invasion in 1941 (see BARBAROSSA) than was Stalin and German diplomats recorded his anguished complaints about Hitler's treachery. Unlike Stalin, however, he did not immediately buckle under the strain, and it was he who made the first major announcement of the outbreak of the German–Soviet war to the Soviet public.

Molotov continued to behave as he had always done. The Finns had noted his harsh mode of speech in the negotiations following the Finnish–Soviet war of 1939–40. He was equally harsh in negotiations with his own allies after the Soviet Union's entry into the war against Germany. Stalin made use of his reputation as a dourly Bolshevik fanatic in the various meetings with western Allied representatives in 1942 as well as at the major conferences of the Allies at Teheran in November 1943 (see Eureka), Yalta in February 1945 (see ARGONAUT), and Potsdam in July 1945 (see TERMINAL). Molotov was indeed, like Stalin, an ideologically-driven fanatic as well as a bureaucrat. The recovery and subsequent advance of the Red Army in 1943–4, moreover, confirmed his confidence that the future of civilized states and societies lay with communism and that capitalism's life was drawing to a close.

Molotov was an admirer of Stalin, but feared him also. Stalin even arrested his wife after the war. Molotov lost the post of foreign minister in 1949; and, from 1952, his career fell into eclipse when Stalin criticized him at a Central Committee plenum. On Stalin's death he again became minister of foreign affairs; but he fell out with Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1971) and was pushed down into lowly jobs from 1957 as a member of ‘the anti-party group’ until his retirement.

Robert Service