Vyacheslav Molotov

Born February 25, 1890
Kukarka, Nolinsk region,
Vyatka province, Russia
Died November 8, 1986
Moscow, Russia, Soviet Union

Soviet revolutionary,
politician, and statesman

V yacheslav Molotov was the closest friend and loyal aide of Joseph Stalin (1879–1953; see entry) throughout Stalin's reign as leader of the Soviet Union. Won over to communism as a teenager, Molotov never strayed from the strict party line and always viewed Stalin's policies, however terror-filled, as correct. Molotov's talks with Western powers in the years following World War II (1939–45) helped fuel the Cold War (1945–91). The Cold War was an intense political and economic rivalry from 1945 to 1991 between the United States and the Soviet Union, falling just short of military conflict.

Young revolutionary

Vyacheslav Mikhaylovich Scriabin was born to middle-class parents in the small central Russian town of Kukarka. Around 1912, he adopted his revolutionary surname "Molotov," which means hammer. Molotov was related to Russian composer Aleksandr Nikolaevich Scriabin and as a youngster studied the violin. During this time, the tsars, Russia's monarchy, ruled the country harshly, decreasing local rule and appointing aristocrats to administer over the industrial workers and peasants. This led to poor working conditions, greater poverty and hunger, and growing discontent among the citizens. As Molotov's family became more interested and involved in the peasant and worker unrest in the early and mid-1900s, he decided to forgo study in music for a more practical education. He attended high school in the nearby city of Kazan. There, Molotov was introduced to the ideas of German philosopher Karl Marx (1818–1883), considered the father of communism. Communism is a system of government, where a single party, the Communist Party, controls all aspects of people's lives. In economic theory, it prohibits private ownership of property and business, so that goods produced and wealth accumulated are shared relatively equally by all.

Revolutionary ideas had reached into the Nolinsk region by 1905. The young, impressionable Molotov and his friends listened to speeches and heard of the general railroad strikes, the workers' rebellion in Saint Petersburg, and landowners' estates burning in several Russian provinces. Molotov joined student Marxist groups and began learning about the Bolsheviks (communists) when a close friend's father began financially supporting them. Molotov joined the Social Democratic Party in 1906 at the age of sixteen and leaned toward the Bolshevik faction.

Molotov soon learned revolutionary tactics such as agitation, which involved getting workers riled up about injustices they were being subjected to and inciting them to take action, and getting the communist message to everyday Russians. Arrested and exiled for two years for radical politics in opposition to the tsar, he ended up in Vologda near the city of Saint Petersburg. Even in exile, Molotov continued to hone his revolutionary skills, as he worked among railroad workers. After his release from exile, he studied at Saint Petersburg Polytechnic. Molotov met Joseph Stalin in 1912 through his aunt who rented a room to Stalin. Stalin was already constantly sought after by police for spreading revolutionary communist propaganda, but Molotov and Stalin struck up a life-long friendship. Also that year, Molotov became associated with the new Communist Party newspaper, Pravda, which means "truth."

Through the next five years, Molotov was exiled several more times for revolutionary activities but maintained his work for Pravda. Back in Saint Petersburg by 1916, he worked closely with Bolshevik leader Vladimir I. Lenin (1870–1924) and Stalin in opposition to the Provisional Government. Molotov helped organize workers' strikes, which preceded the February Revolution in 1917. Molotov was a member of the Military Revolutionary Committee that planned the successful Bolshevik coup, known as the "October Revolution," that same year. The October Revolution marked the beginning of the communist state in Russia.

Continuing to gain Stalin's trust and holding several party posts in the provinces, Molotov rose through the Communist Party ranks, establishing himself as a strict party line administrator. In November 1920, he was appointed secretary, or chief official, of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Bolshevik Party. On a trip to the Ukraine, Molotov met a young Jewish female party worker, Polina Zhemchuzhina, on a sugar beet farm where she labored. They were soon married. Stalin was the best man.

Communist Party ascent

In March 1921, Molotov was elected to full membership in the Central Committee of the entire Communist Party, a membership he would retain until 1957. In 1921, he was briefly the secretary (head) of the Central Committee before being replaced by Stalin in 1922. Molotov, now Stalin's most trusted and faithful aide, remained second in command of the Central Committee. Upon Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin, with Molotov's help, continued to concentrate power in his hands, fighting off all opponents. Stalin arranged for Molotov to gain full membership in the Politburo on January 1, 1926, a membership he retained until 1952. The Central Committee was the administrative body of the Communist Party that ruled the Soviet Union. The secretary of the Central Committee was the top power in the party, therefore the top power in the country. The Politburo, known as the Presidium between 1953 and 1966, was contained in the Central Committee and directed party policy.

Stalin loyalist

Molotov and Stalin worked together constantly, as Stalin managed to take full control of the Soviet government by the late 1920s. Molotov took the lead in Stalin's plan of collectivization of agriculture, in which private ownership of land was abolished and all farmers on state farms were grouped together. It was Molotov who "dealt" with the wealthier peasants resisting collectivization, murdering many or sending them to labor camps in Siberia. Molotov also wholeheartedly went along with Stalin's political purges of the 1930s. Many of those purged were Stalin's and Molotov's old Bolshevik friends and colleagues. Without hesitation, Molotov signed their death warrants or approved their removal to the labor camp system. Even his own wife, who was a Jew, was sent to the labor camps without Molotov's protest. Molotov was able to work with Stalin without challenging his authority, so he was able to avoid being purged himself. On December 19, 1930, Stalin made Molotov chairman of the Council of Peoples' Commissars of the Soviet Union. This title was much like the prime minister or head of government in other countries. Of course, Stalin was the real head of power, but Molotov, in name, was head of the Soviet government.

World War II

In 1939, with Europe headed for war, while still chairman of the Council of Peoples' Commissars, Molotov also became Commissar of Foreign Affairs. Molotov opened talks with such Western powers as England and France but also began secret talks with Germany's Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) and his Nazi Party, known primarily for its brutal policies of racism. Dismayed at the rise of Nazi Germany, Stalin and Molotov secretly decided to try and deal with Hitler. Shocking the United States and Western Europe, on August 23, 1939, Molotov and Stalin concluded a treaty of nonaggression with German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop (1893–1946). The Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, also called the Soviet-German Nonaggression Treaty, divided Europe into Nazi and Soviet spheres. Despite the treaty, Hitler surprised Stalin by invading the Soviet Union on June 21, 1941.

Talks with Western countries took on a great deal of urgency. In May 1942, Molotov worked out a treaty with England for mutual economic and military aid. He proceeded on to the United States and worked out further military agreements.

To stop the advance of Hitler's Nazi army that was over-running Europe, the Soviets became uneasy allies of Britain and the United States. In October 1943 Molotov met with Allied leaders to plan a conference in November in Tehran, Iran. British prime minister Winston Churchill (1874–1965; see entry), U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945; served 1933–45), and Stalin, with Molotov by his side, attended. Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin were dubbed the "Big Three." Molotov would attend all postwar conferences.

The Big Three met again in February 1945 in Yalta in the Crimea region (a peninsula that juts out into the Black Sea) of the Soviet Union to decide defeated Germany's postwar fate. Always sullen and serious, Molotov was even less willing than Stalin to come to agreement with Churchill and Roosevelt. Eventually the latter two gave in to many of the Soviets' demands. Roosevelt, realizing the great devastation the Nazis had caused the Soviet Union, wanted to go along with the Soviets as much as possible. It was Molotov who was largely responsible for beginning the division of Europe into the Eastern (Soviet) European sphere of influence and the Western (United States, Britain, and France) European sphere.

Cold War tensions

Roosevelt died suddenly on April 12, 1945, and Vice President Harry S. Truman (1884–1972; served 1945–53; see entry) took over the U.S. presidency. Within two weeks, Truman called Molotov to the White House and thoroughly berated him for the way the communists were taking over Eastern Europe. Molotov was enraged. Molotov and Stalin realized that the wartime Allied cooperation was at an end. The Cold War was at hand. At the next postwar conference in July 1945 in Potsdam, Germany, President Truman took Stalin and Molotov aside and told them the United States had a new powerful weapon. Truman did not think they realized he was speaking of an atomic weapon. However, the Soviets had had spies deep within the U.S. atomic weapon development program, the Manhattan Project, for some time and already knew of the successful U.S. detonation of the world's first atomic bomb. The Soviets were already pursuing their own atomic program, of which Molotov was initially in charge.

In February 1946, Stalin made a speech in Moscow that seemed to declare another war, this time on all capitalist countries. At the Council of Foreign Ministers Conference in Paris in April, Molotov inflamed Cold War tensions more by speaking as though all countries must come under communism sooner or later. It was in Paris that Molotov became known as Comrade Nyet (the Russian word for "no"). The Soviets, defensive about their own weakened condition after the war, wanted desperately to build a buffer zone around the Soviet Union to protect it from future Western aggression. They refused to budge on their occupations of Eastern European countries that were forming the buffer zone. Molotov also stressed his country wanted to keep Germany in a weakened state and divided. But on this point the United States wanted to strengthen and reunite Germany to resist what it saw as a real possibility of Soviet expansion farther west. Because of these unbending opposite viewpoints, the Paris Peace Conference from the end of July into October 1946 was a failure.

Meanwhile, the United States detonated two atomic bombs in the Pacific to remind the Soviets of its nuclear monopoly. But the Soviet atomic project was progressing rapidly. By that time, Stalin had taken the busy Molotov off the atomic development project and replaced him with Lavrenty Beria (1899–1953), head of the KGB, the dreaded Soviet secret police. Also inside the Soviet Union, Stalin had resumed his purge of all individuals he deemed anti-Stalin in any way. The loyal Molotov, however, continued to hold Stalin's trust.

What to do with the divided Germany continued to be a point of debate between the Soviets and the United States, Britain, and France. In March 1948, Molotov, still Soviet foreign minister, charged the Western powers with using the Germany issue to annoy Soviet leadership. With Molotov's approval in June 1948, the Soviets began a total land blockade of the Western sectors of the city of Berlin that had been divided after World War II among the Allies, just as the whole of Germany had been divided. Inflaming Cold War tension even more, the blockade lasted until May 1949. The Allies, through a massive airlift of goods, supplied the blockaded city.

Fall from power

About March 1949, Molotov seemed to have possibly landed at last on Stalin's purge list. Unexplainably, he disappeared from Soviet politics. Then sometime in midsummer, he was relieved of his foreign minister position. However, Molotov remained a member of the Politburo. Nevertheless, by late 1952, the ever more paranoid Stalin was clearly suspicious of Molotov, even thinking he may have been spying for the United States.

Only Stalin's death in March 1953 saved Molotov from being another purge victim. Even so, Molotov was the only Soviet official to show emotion at Stalin's funeral in 1953. Upon Stalin's death, Molotov was returned to his post as Soviet foreign minister, and he retained that position until June 1956, when disagreements grew with innovative Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1971; see entry), the Soviet Union's new leader. Molotov's hard-line stance against the United States and Western European nations did not correlate with Khrushchev's idea of peaceful coexistence. Molotov also denounced Khrushchev's speeches against Stalin. Molotov firmly held to the correctness of Stalin's policies.

In early 1957, Molotov joined with the so-called Anti-Party group of party conservatives to remove Khrushchev from power at a Presidium (formerly the Politburo) meeting in June. The attempt failed. Molotov refused to admit he had been wrong. Molotov was stripped of all his posts and practically exiled when sent to Mongolia as ambassador between 1957 and 1960.

Between 1960 and 1962, Molotov managed to head the Soviet delegation to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, Austria. His consistent criticism of Khrushchev, however, cost him that post. He began a long retirement in 1962. During Khrushchev's last months as secretary general in 1964, he had Molotov expelled from the Communist Party. Molotov continued to live in Moscow in obscurity with his wife, who had returned from the labor camps. In 1984, he was readmitted to the party due to the influence of Andrey Gromyko (1909–1989; see entry), Soviet foreign minister from 1957 to 1985. Gromyko had once worked under Molotov. Molotov wrote his memoirs, but they remained unpublished at his death in 1986.

For More Information

Books

Bromage, Bernard. Molotov: The Story of an Era. London: Peter Owen, Ltd., 1956.

Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993.

Conquest, Robert. The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties. New York: Macmillan, 1968.

Diljus, Milovan. Conversations with Stalin. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962.

Isaacs, Jeremy, and Taylor Downing. Cold War: An Illustrated History, 1945–1991. Boston: Little, Brown, 1998.

Kennedy-Pipe, Caroline. Stalin's Cold War: Soviet Strategies in Europe, 1943 to 1956. Manchester, Eng.: Manchester University Press, 1995.

Resis, Albert. Stalin, the Politburo, and the Onset of the Cold War, 1945–1946. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Center for Russian and East European Studies, 1988.

Taubman, William. Stalin's American Policy: From Entente to Detente to Cold War. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.

Zubok, Vladislav M., and Constantine Pleshakov. Inside the Kremlin's Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.

The Molotov Cocktail

Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov had the privilege of having a weapon named after him during World WarII. As the Nazi Germany army was launching a massive offensive against the Soviet Union in 1941, the retreating Soviet Army was desperate to try to repel the attack any way they could. A key element of the German attack was large numbers of armored tanks. An effective, but simple, weapon against tanks was a crude bomb made of a bottle filled with a flammable fluid, usually gasoline, and fitted with a wick at the neck, often a rag soaked in gasoline. A Soviet soldier would ignite the wick and hurl it at a German tank, aiming for the engine compartment and trying to set the engine on fire, or aiming it at the space between the turret, or gun enclosure, and the main tank shell. The soldiers began calling these antitank weapons Molotov Cocktails after the foreign minister.

Though simple in construction, it took daring to use the Molotov Cocktails, as the thrower had to be within a throwing

distance of the often-advancing tank with enemy foot soldiers shortly behind. The association of his name with a crude but deadly weapon added to Molotov's communist hard-line public image through the Cold War.