Vyacheslav Molotov

From Wikinfo

Alternate meaning: Molotov cocktail (bomb)

Vyacheslav Mikhaylovich Molotov (Вячесла́в Миха́йлович Мо́лотов) (MOL-lah-tough) (March 9 [February 25, Old Style], 1890 - November 8, 1986) was a Soviet politician and diplomat. Molotov and Stalin himself were the only senior revolutionary Bolsheviks to survive the Great Purges of the 1930s.

He was born in Kukarka (now Sovetsk), Russia, as Vyacheslav Mikhaylovich Skryabin (Скря́бин) (he was a relative of the composer Alexander Scriabin). He joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1906 and took the pseudonym Molotov (from Russian: hammer). He was, along with Alexander Shlyapnikov, the senior Bolshevik in Petrograd at the time of the February Revolution as figures such as Lenin were still in exile. After what appears to be an odyssey through the landscape of geographic and political Russia including an important role in the October Revolution and editing the newspaper Pravda for a while, he started working under Joseph Stalin in 1922.

From December 19, 1930 to May 9, 1941, he was Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, in which role he acted as the formal head of state of the USSR. On the eve of World War II, he became People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs (Foreign Minister). It is believed that he was made foreign minister because his predecessor, Maxim Litvinov, was Jewish, and might thus have insulted the Germans by his role in negotiations. Molotov negotiated in parallel with both the West and Nazis to secure maximal territorial gain for Soviet Union. After British-French-Soviet talks held in August of 1939 failed, he negotiated the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with his German counterpart, Joachim von Ribbentrop. Following the secret protocol of the pact, Soviet Union invaded Poland on September 17, 1939. For the citizens of eastern Poland, this meant the beginning of mass arrests and deportations of "class enemies" to the eastern part of the Soviet Union. In this period, Molotov publicly expressed his satisfaction at the fall of Poland under both German and Soviet onslaughts, blaming the Polish state and its "landlords' rule" for the oppression of ethnic minorities.

As a member of the Soviet politburo, Molotov routinely rubberstamped mass executions of the "enemies of the people". For example, on March 5, 1940, the politburo signed an order of execution (prepared by Lavrenti Beria) of 25,700 members of the Polish intelligentsia, including 14,700 Polish prisoners of war. This became known as the Katyn massacre, which was vigorously denied by the Soviet Union.

During the period prior to the outbreak of war between the USSR and Germany in 1941, Molotov consistently annoyed the Germans with his pragmatic tenacity during negotiations, insisting on preserving or advancing Soviet interests in Eastern Europe, and not being deceived by idle German promises of concessions in other faraway parts of the world, such as India. (On one occasion, when Ribbentrop was discussing dividing up the spoils of a soon-to-be-conquered British Empire, Molotov responded by asking him why, if Britain was doomed, they were holding negotiations in an air raid shelter.) Later on, he also frustrated U.S President Franklin D. Roosevelt with his firm stance on issues during the war.

Hours after the German invasion on June 22, 1941, he gave a speech, where he stated the fact of German unprovoked aggression and had declared the fight until victory now that it had begun.

He served as foreign minister until 1949 (when he was replaced by Andrei Vyshinsky), and then again from 1953 to 1956.

Following Stalin's death in 1953, Molotov found himself at odds with the reformist policies of Stalin's eventual successor, Nikita Khrushchev, and was strongly opposed to Khrushchev's 1956 denunciation of Stalin. In 1957, along with other top Stalinists such as Lazar Kaganovich, he attempted a coup within the party to oust Khrushchev. When this failed, it provided Khrushchev with a pretext to demote Molotov to a series of increasingly irrelevant posts: first as Ambassador to Mongolia (1957 - 1960) and then as the permanent Soviet delegate to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna (1960 - 1961). By 1964, he had been expelled from the party altogether.

Molotov was allowed to rejoin the party in 1984, but this was a purely symbolic gesture. By the time of his death (at the age of 96) in Moscow on November 8, 1986, he was the last surviving major participant in the events of 1917.

Soldiers of the Finnish Army mockingly named the Molotov cocktail after him, as Molotov served as the Commissar for Foreign Affairs during the time of the Russo-Finnish War (1939-1940).

References

• Adapted from the Wikipedia article, "Vyacheslav_Molotov" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vyacheslav_Molotov, used under the GNU Free Documentation License