Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov

Russian political leader

• Born: March 9, 1890
• Birthplace: Kukarka, Vyatka Province, Russia
• Died: November 8, 1986
• Place of death: Moscow, Soviet Union (now in Russia)

Molotov, one of Joseph Stalin’s most loyal subordinates, played a major role in the development of the Soviet Union’s domestic and foreign policies, particularly the creation of the centralized command economy and the establishment of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.

Early Life

Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov (vee-AH-chah-slahf mih-KAY-luh-vihch MOH-lah-tawf) was born Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Skryabin, the third son of Mikhail Skryabin, a middle-class merchant who was prosperous enough to afford a good education for his children. Vyacheslav was attending secondary school in Kazan at the time of the revolution of 1905. He began reading Marxist tracts and joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party the following year, gravitating toward Vladimir Ilich Lenin’s Bolshevik faction. Like many revolutionaries in czarist Russia, he employed a number of pseudonyms in an effort to conceal his true identity from the police. He first used the name “Molotov,” which is derived from the Russian word for “hammer,” in 1918 and kept it for the remainder of his life.

Molotov’s early revolutionary activity foreshadowed the important but subordinate role that typified his later career. A friend from his Kazan school days recruited him to join the staff of Pravda, the Bolshevik Party’s newspaper in St. Petersburg. Molotov published a few minor articles in Pravda, but he did not establish a name for himself as a Marxist thinker or writer. He was arrested twice for revolutionary activity but resumed his editorial work on Pravda after the February Revolution of 1917 overthrew Czar Nicholas II. In the absence of the more prominent Bolsheviks, most of whom were in Siberian or foreign exile at the time the revolution broke out, Molotov became a member of the party’s Central Committee. With the return of Lenin and other leading Bolsheviks, however, Molotov was relegated to a secondary role, distinguishing himself with his clerical skills and capacity for paperwork. He was a consummate bureaucrat rather than an inspiring leader in the revolution and ensuing civil war.

Life’s Work

Molotov’s rise to political prominence began shortly after the end of the civil war. In March, 1921, at the Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party (as the Bolshevik Party had been renamed in 1918), Molotov became executive secretary of the party’s Central Committee, a candidate (nonvoting) member of the Politburo, and head of a new bureaucratic organization, the Secretariat, which was in charge of party records and correspondence. The following year, the Secretariat was reorganized, with Joseph Stalin assuming the title of general-secretary, and Molotov once again reduced to a subordinate role. This change, however, marked the beginning of Molotov’s close political collaboration with Stalin.

For nearly three decades, Molotov was Stalin’s most faithful supporter. A short, stocky man who wore a mustache and pince-nez eyeglasses, Molotov supported Stalin against his rivals in the struggle for power after Lenin’s death in January, 1924. Becoming a full member of the Politburo in 1925, Molotov also supported Stalin’s efforts to create a highly centralized “command economy” during the 1930’s. Stalin sought to achieve this goal through a series of “five-year plans” that forced most peasants to join collective farms and based rapid industrial growth on government fiat rather than on market forces. Stalin, recognizing Molotov’s bureaucratic skills, had him named to the post of chair of the Council of People’s Commissars (the Soviet equivalent of premier) in 1930 to oversee the governmental bureaucracy during this period of internal upheaval. Molotov was also deeply involved with Stalin’s Great Purge of the Communist Party in the later 1930’s, cosigning arrest warrants and execution orders that sometimes contained hundreds, even thousands, of names. Molotov never wavered in his conviction that Stalin’s policies, which caused the deaths of several million Soviet citizens and inflicted enormous hardship on the country, were absolutely necessary for the defense of the Soviet Union against its capitalist enemies.

In May, 1939, Molotov suddenly replaced Maksim Maksimovich Litvinov as people’s commissar of foreign affairs (the revolutionary title of “people’s commissar” was replaced by “minister” in 1946). Litvinov had strongly promoted a policy of “collective security,” which meant that the Soviet Union sought cooperation with the capitalist states of Western Europe against the common threat of Nazi-ruled Germany. Litvinov’s replacement by Molotov, who had virtually no foreign policy experience, was a signal that Stalin was willing to abandon collective security in favor of a separate deal with Nazi Germany. After several weeks of hesitation, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler sent his foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, to Moscow to negotiate what became known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which the two foreign ministers signed on August 23, 1939. The Soviet Union promised to remain neutral in the upcoming conflict in exchange for territorial concessions (including eastern Poland, Estonia, and Latvia) that were spelled out in a secret protocol attached to the treaty. Lithuania and Moldova were later added to the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact bought a twenty-two month respite from World War II for the Soviet Union (not counting the invasion of Poland in September, 1939, and its Winter War against Finland in 1939-1940), but Stalin did not wisely use this time to prepare his country for war with Germany.

Stalin assumed the title of premier in May, 1941, but Molotov continued to supervise the day-to-day operations of the government as his first deputy. It was Molotov, not Stalin, who addressed the Soviet people on June 22, 1941, breaking the news that Germany had invaded the Soviet Union that morning. He also authorized the mass production of a weapon consisting of a bottle filled with an inflammable liquid; German soldiers called these primitive antitank weapons “Molotov cocktails.” After the German invasion, Molotov’s diplomatic role changed from trying to placate Germany to negotiating with the Soviet Union’s allies, Great Britain and the United States, and securing a Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. He took part in the four major wartime conferences (Moscow in 1942, Tehran in 1943, and Yalta and Potsdam in 1945) at which the Allied powers discussed coordination of their war efforts and the postwar settlement. Since Stalin traveled only to places occupied by Soviet troops, such as Tehran and Potsdam, Molotov also represented the Soviet Union in negotiations held in the United Kingdom or the United States, including the San Francisco Conference, which created the United Nations in April, 1945.

Allied cooperation, however, did not long survive the defeat of Germany and Japan. Stalin was determined to keep control of the territories that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had gained for the Soviet Union and insisted that only governments friendly to the Soviet Union could rule in the neighboring countries of Eastern Europe. The Western Allies, on the other hand, favored self-determination for Eastern Europe. This disagreement over the future of Eastern Europe produced the Cold War. Fearing that free elections would threaten Soviet security interests in Eastern Europe, Stalin imposed obedient communist governments in 1947 and 1948. Molotov rigidly defended these policies at the United Nations and during negotiations with the Western powers.

By 1949, Molotov was losing Stalin’s favor. Stalin ordered the arrest of Molotov’s wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina, who was Jewish, on the spurious charge of being a Zionist; she remained imprisoned until after Stalin’s death. When the Central Committee debated and rubber-stamped the arrest, Molotov did not defend her and abstained from voting rather than violate party discipline. In March, 1949, Andrei Vyshinsky, the notorious prosecutor in the show trials of the late 1930’s, replaced him as foreign minister. According to Nikita S. Khrushchev, Stalin, who was becoming increasingly suspicious in his last years, believed that Molotov had become an “agent of American imperialism.” At the Nineteenth Party Congress in October, 1952, Stalin sharply criticized Molotov, who was not reelected to the Presidium (which replaced the Politburo from 1952 to 1966). Molotov probably would have been one of the principal victims of a new blood purge that Stalin was preparing, but he was saved by the dictator’s death on March 4, 1953.

Following Stalin’s death, Molotov was restored to the Presidium and regained the post of foreign minister but had little impact on policy. He supported Khrushchev against Lavrenti Beria and Georgy Malenkov in the power struggle to succeed Stalin but strongly disagreed with the new Soviet leader’s departures from Stalinist orthodoxy in both domestic and foreign affairs. Molotov was removed from the foreign ministry in June, 1956, after the Twentieth Party Congress, at which Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s terror against the party and his blindness regarding Hitler, policies with which Molotov was closely associated. After a failed attempt by Molotov and other members of the so-called Anti-Party Group to overthrow Khrushchev in June, 1957, Molotov was removed from the Presidium and the Central Committee. The former foreign minister served in the comparatively minor post of ambassador to Mongolia until 1960, then as Soviet representative to the International Agency on Atomic Energy in Vienna, Austria. Amid another round of de-Stalinization in 1962, Molotov was expelled from the Communist Party. He spent the remainder of his life living obscurely, though comfortably, in Moscow. In 1984, two years before his death, Molotov was readmitted to the Communist Party during the brief neo-Stalinist rule of Konstantin Chernenko. It was a last symbolic victory of the Stalinist system before the onset of the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev, the collapse of the Soviet Union’s East European empire, and the end of the Soviet Union itself in 1991.

Significance

Stalin and Molotov wanted to turn the Soviet Union into one of the world’s great powers, and the economic transformation of the 1930’s and victory in World War II seemed to achieve this goal. At the time of his death, Molotov had no inkling that the Soviet Union would survive him by only five years. Yet the system that he had done so much to create contained the seeds of its own demise. The centralized command economy favored military needs and heavy industry over consumer goods and concern for the environment. The collective farm system emphasized political control over the production and sale of agricultural goods rather than efficiency or innovation. The Communist Party’s dictatorship necessitated the suppression of both political opposition and the free flow of information. The Soviet Union’s sphere of influence in Eastern Europe could be maintained only by force. Faced with economic stagnation, declining living standards, serious environmental problems, and recurring unrest in Eastern Europe, a new generation of Soviet leaders, headed by Gorbachev, decided that it was necessary to implement radical changes in the system that Molotov had done so much to build.

Bibliography

Chuev, Felix. Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics, Conversations with Felix Chuev. Edited by Albert Resis. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1993. These reminiscences, recorded by a Soviet journalist over a period of several years, show that even in his last years Molotov remained an unrepentant Stalinist who was proud of his accomplishments.

Mastny, Vojtech. The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity: The Stalin Years. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. This detailed investigation of Soviet foreign policy during the years 1947-1953 argues that Stalin’s insatiable quest for security and control made the Cold War inevitable.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Russia’s Road to the Cold War: Diplomacy, Warfare, and the Politics of Communism, 1941-1945. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979. Although it was published before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of Soviet archives, this book remains a classic study of Soviet foreign policy during World War II.

Medvedev, Roy. All Stalin’s Men: Six Who Carried Out the Bloody Policies. Translated by Harold Shukman. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984. This volume contains biographical studies of Molotov and five other members of Stalin’s inner circle written by a prominent Soviet-era dissident historian.

Miner, Steven Merritt. “His Master’s Voice: Viacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov as Stalin’s Foreign Commissar.” In The Diplomats, 1939-1979, edited by Gordon A. Craig and Francis L. Loeweneim. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994. Concentrating on Molotov’s first period as Soviet foreign minister (1939-1949), Miner argues that Molotov was Stalin’s faithful servant in carrying out Soviet foreign policy but played a minor role, at best, in shaping policy.

Tucker, Robert C. Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928-1941. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990. This magisterial history of the internal transformation of the Soviet Union illuminates Molotov’s role in domestic politics.

Watson, Derek. Molotov: A Biography. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. A biography and commentary on Soviet history based on new sources that became available after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Zubok, Vladislav, and Constantine Pleshakov. Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996. This study of Soviet foreign policy toward the West from 1945 to 1962, written by two Russian historians, contends that Molotov played a significant role in formulating, not merely implementing, Soviet foreign policy under Stalin.