Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov

The Soviet statesman Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov (1890-1986) was second in command during Stalin's regime and served as the chief Soviet diplomat in World War II.

Vyacheslav Molotov was born on March 9, 1890, in the village of Kukarka (now Sovetsk) in what is now the Kirov Oblast. His family name was Scriabin, and he was distantly related to the famous composer of the same name. His family sent him to the gymnasium (high school) in Kazan, and it was there, as a teen-ager, that he first became involved in the revolutionary movement, taking a minor part in the Revolution of 1905. The following year he joined the Bolsheviks and, to avoid police harassment, changed his name to Molotov (literally, "of the hammer").

In 1909, just prior to his graduation, he was arrested for political agitation and exiled for 2 years to Vologda Province. Instead of returning to Kazan, he made his way to St. Petersburg, where he studied briefly at the Polytechnic Institute. More importantly, living in the capital afforded him the opportunity for involvement in the new Bolshevik newspaper Pravdaand for establishing his first contact with Joseph Stalin.

Unlike most other Bolsheviks, Molotov spent no time abroad, and when World War I broke out, he was still in Russia. In June 1915 he was again arrested and exiled, this time to the distant Siberian province of Irkutsk. Late in 1916 he escaped from Siberia and managed to get back to the capital, now renamed Petrograd, where he rejoined the revolutionary movement. He was one of the few Bolsheviks of any prominence who were in Petrograd when the monarchy was overthrown, and he became immediately involved in issuing the rejuvenated Pravda. He also joined the Petrograd Soviet, becoming perhaps the most important Bolshevik in that organization until the election of Leon Trotsky to its presidency. After the Bolshevik seizure of power in November 1917, he assumed a variety of government tasks, most of them away from the center of power.

In 1921, probably at the behest of Stalin, Molotov was chosen a candidate member of the Central Committee, and from that time his fortunes were irrevocably tied to Stalin's. In the intraparty struggle he identified even more closely with Stalin and was elevated to the Politburo in 1926. In 1928 he was made first secretary of the Moscow Party Committee and proceeded to purge it of non-Stalinists.

In 1930 Molotov's work was rewarded with his appointment as chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (that is, prime minister) of the Soviet Union. He held this post for over a decade, adding the foreign affairs post in 1939. In the latter post he acquired an international reputation, first negotiating the infamous Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 but later serving as Stalin's top representative at the various wartime conferences: Teheran (1943), Yalta (1945), and Potsdam (1945), and at the founding conference of the United Nations in 1945.

In 1949 Molotov yielded the Foreign Ministry to Andrei Vishinsky but continued as vice-chairman of the Council of Ministers. Upon Stalin's death in March 1953, he emerged as potentially one of the strongest leaders, reassuming control over the Foreign Ministry and forming, with Lavrenty Beria and Georgi Malenkov, an ephemeral triumvirate that presumably controlled the Bolshevik party. Though he outlasted both of his partners, by 1955 it was apparent that Molotov had lost considerable power.

The Twentieth Party Congress of February 1956 and the resultant anti-Stalin line ruined Molotov's chances as he was so closely identified in the public eye with the Stalinist heritage. Later that year, Dmitri Shepilov replaced him as foreign minister. In the summer of 1957 Molotov and others of the "antiparty" group were expelled from the Central Committee. Molotov himself was made emissary to Outer Mongolia, roughly the equivalent of exile, and was forced to remain there until 1960. Then he made a small comeback by becoming the Soviet representative to the International Atomic Energy Conference in Vienna. In 1961 at the Twenty-second Party Congress a renewed denunciation of Stalin led to new cries for punishment for Molotov, but he escaped banishment or any serious penalty and retired from public life. In 1984 he was reinstated to the party, but died in Moscow on November 8, 1986.

Further Reading

Molotov's views as a foreign minister can be seen in some anthologies of his speeches, for example, Problems of Foreign Policy (trans. 1949). Molotov was sufficiently bland to defy biographers, but there is Bernard Bromage, Molotov: The Story of an Era (1956). Most studies of Stalin devote some attention to Molotov, notably Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography (1949; rev. ed. 1966). □

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

Molotov, Vyacheslav (Mikhailovich) (born Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Skryabin) (1890–1986) Soviet statesman. Born in Russia, he was an early member of the Bolsheviks and a staunch supporter of Stalin after Lenin's death. As Commissar (later Minister) for Foreign Affairs (1939–49; 1953–56), he negotiated the non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany (1939) and after 1945 represented the Soviet Union at meetings of the United Nations, where his frequent exercise of the veto helped to prolong the cold war. He was expelled from his party posts in 1956 after quarrelling with Khrushchev.

Molotov, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich (1890–1986) Soviet statesman, premier (1930–41) and foreign minister (1939–49, 1953–56). A loyal ally of Stalin, he became a full member of the Politburo in 1926. As foreign minister, one of Molotov's first acts was to sign the Nazi-Soviet Pact (1939) with von Ribbentrop. His enthusiastic use of the veto in the UN Security Council contributed to the Cold War. He lost favour under Nikita Khrushchev, and was demoted and expelled from the Communist Party in 1962. Molotov was readmitted in 1984.