Vyacheslav Molotov

Vyacheslav Molotov (born February 25 [March 9, New Style], 1890, Kukarka [now Sovetsk], Russia—died November 8, 1986, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.) was a statesman and diplomat who served as foreign minister and the major spokesman for the Soviet Union at Allied conferences during and immediately after World War II.

A member and organizer of the Bolshevik party from 1906, Molotov was twice arrested (1909, 1915) for his revolutionary activities. After the Bolsheviks seized power (1917), Molotov worked in several provincial party organizations. In 1921 he became a member and a secretary of the Central Committee as well as a candidate member of the Politburo. He staunchly supported Joseph Stalin after the death of Vladimir Ilich Lenin (1924), and in December 1926 he was promoted to full membership in the Politburo. He then assumed control of the Moscow Party Committee and purged the Moscow organization of its anti-Stalin membership (1928–30). In 1930 he was made chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars (i.e., prime minister of the Soviet Union), a post he held until 1941.

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Shortly before the outbreak of World War II, Molotov was picked by Stalin to replace Maksim Litvinov as the Soviet commissar of foreign affairs (May 1939). In this capacity he negotiated the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact (Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact; August 1939) with Nazi Germany. In May 1941, when Stalin himself took over as chairman of the Council of Ministers (formerly Council of People’s Commissars), Molotov remained its first deputy chairman. After Germany invaded the Soviet Union (June 1941), he also served on the State Defense Committee (the special war cabinet). Molotov arranged the Soviet alliances with Great Britain and the United States and attended the Allies’ conferences at Tehrān (1943), Yalta (1945), and Potsdam (1945) as well as the San Francisco Conference (1945), which created the United Nations. In his wartime dealings with the Allies and afterward, he earned a reputation for uncompromising hostility to the West.

Molotov was the Soviet foreign minister in 1939 when he authorized the illegal Soviet invasion of Finland during the early days of World War II, thus starting the Russo-Finnish War. Molotov, skilled in propaganda, referred to the cluster bombs dropped by the Soviets on Finland as “food parcels” for starving Finns. The Finnish resistance was stronger than the Soviet Union expected, and the invasion lasted through the winter and into March 1940, when the vastly outnumbered Finns agreed to a peace treaty. Finnish fighters extensively used incendiary weapons made from bottles filled with a mixture of tar, ethanol, and gasoline, stoppered with wicks. In a bit of black humour, Finns christened them “Molotov cocktails”—drinks intended to accompany Molotov’s “food parcels.” The distillery at Rajamäki, outside Helsinki, which was owned by Finland’s state-owned alcohol monopoly, Oy Alkoholiliike Ab, switched to making Molotov cocktails, and it even acquired several antiaircraft guns to counter Soviet bombers targeting the distillery. Some 540,000 Molotov cocktails were manufactured by a workforce of more than 90 people, almost all of them women. The popularity of the weapons during the conflict between Finland and the Soviet Union led to the global adoption of the term Molotov cocktail.

In March 1949 Molotov gave up the post of foreign minister, but, after Stalin died (March 1953), he resumed it, holding it until his political disagreements with Nikita Khrushchev resulted in his dismissal (June 1956). He was made minister of state control in November, but, when he joined the “antiparty group” that unsuccessfully tried to depose Khrushchev in June 1957, he lost all his high party and state offices. He subsequently served as ambassador to Mongolia and as the Soviet delegate to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna (1960–61). In 1962, after engaging in more criticisms of Khrushchev, he was expelled from the Communist Party. He lived thereafter in undisturbed retirement in Moscow.