Molotov

Name: Vyacheslav Mikhaylovich Molotov

Nickname/Alias: born: Vyacheslav Mikhaylovich Skryabin

Achievements: Soviet foreign minister during the Second World War and for most of the time up until 1956

Born: March 9, 1890; Kukarka (now Sovetsk), Russia

Died: November 8, 1986; Moscow, Soviet Union (Aged 96)

Field & Discipline: Politics; Statesman; Diplomat

Language: Russian

Father: Unknown (was 2nd cousin to composer Aleksandr Skryabin)

Mother: Unknown

Siblings: Vladimir

Spouse: Paulina Semionova Carpovskaya

Children: Unknown

Education: Local school, Kukarka;  Polytechnic Institute, St. Petersburg

Life & Times:

Molotov became involved in politics when he was a student in Kazan during the revolution of 1905.  He embraced the Bolshevik cause in 1906 and joined the movement to overthrow the Tsarist regime. 

In 1909, he was exiled to the north of Russia for two years. On his release, he studied at the Polytechnic Institute in St. Petersburg, and in 1912, joined [collaborated with] Stalin* to found "Pravda", the Bolshevik newspaper.

In 1915, Molotov was again exiled, but escaped in 1916.  As a member of the Petrograd (St. Petersburg) Military Revolutionary Committee, he helped plan the 1917 Revolution in which the Tsar was overthrown. 

After the Bolsheviks seized power, Molotov became a  member of the executive committee of the Petrograd (St. Petersburg) Soviet, and not long after, a member of the Central Committee.  In the inter-party struggle for power after [collaborated with] Lenin* died in 1924, Molotov supported Stalin.  In 1926, he was elected to the Politburo, the policy-making unit, and led the purge of anti-Stalin Bolsheviks.

In 1930, Molotov became chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (equivalent to Prime Minister).  He supported Stalin's policies of collectivization of agriculture and rapid industrialization. He emerged unscathed from the "show trials", which Stalin used to liquidate many of his opponents. 

In 1939, just before the start of the Second World War, Stalin took over the  Premiership and Molotov became commissar for foreign affairs. He negotiated  a non-aggression pact with the Nazis, signed in August, 1939, giving the Soviet Union valuable time to prepare for a possible war with Germany and to expand its Eastern borders.  When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June, 1941, Molotov negotiated a Soviet-British alliance with Sir Stafford Cripps, the British Ambassador in Moscow, in which it was agreed that neither power would make a separate peace with Germany. 

Molotov was part of the war cabinet and organized industrial re-organization and munitions.  He sped up the production of tanks and was responsible for the production of what became known as "Molotov cocktails": bottles of flammable liquid used as firebombs.

Given plenipotentiary powers, Molotov visited London in 1942, where he held uneasy meetings with Prime Minister [uneasy terms with] Churchill*.  Each was wary of the other.  (Molotov distrusted Churchill so much that while staying with him, he slept with a revolver under his pillow and posted two Russian women outside  his bedroom door.)  Molotov became particularly suspicious when Churchill told him it was premature to open a second front. 

He felt a little more at ease in the United States with President [collaborated with] Franklin D. Roosevelt*, who assured him a second front would be mounted in 1942, (the promise could not be kept).

Molotov attended the Allied conference at Tehran in 1943 and at Yalta and Potsdam in 1945, where he became notorious for his frigid manner.  He attended the 1945 San Francisco conference that established the United Nations and led the Soviet delegation to the U.N. until 1949, when he resigned from his foreign affairs post, though remaining Stalin's deputy  Prime Minister.

When Stalin died in 1953, Molotov again took charge of foreign affairs.  At the 1954 Geneva Conferences, called to end the war between France and  Indo-China, he kept up his aggressive anti-western stance.  Other Russian politicians, such as [joined coup against] Krushchev*, were taking a more liberal attitude, however, and Molotov became increasingly isolated.

In June, 1956, Khrushchev fired Molotov as foreign minister but allowed him to resign.  A few months later, Molotov was made Minister of State Control.  Shortly after, he joined a failed attempt to oust Khrushchev and was dismissed from office and expelled from the Central Committee. 

In August, 1957, he was made ambassador to Mongolia (by Soviet standards a reasonably mild form of  exile).  He was the Soviet delegate at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna from 1960-61, but in 1962, after criticizing Khrushchev again, he was  expelled from the Communist Party.  He spent his remaining years in retirement in Moscow.

Assessment: A hardline Communist who supported Stalin throughout his dictatorship.  His determined hostility to the West did much to promote the era of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West

Oneliner: VM Molotov, Cold-War USSR foreign minister

Bibliography:

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