Vyacheslav Skryabin chose Molotov as his nom de guerre, from the Russian “molot”, which means hammer. The young revolutionary trusted that the industrial and proletarian touch of the nickname would bring him closer to the working masses to whom he had to harangue. Much later, when he reached the top of the Soviet hierarchy, his nickname perfectly suited the implacable and tenacious character of the man who would be Stalin’s most faithful lieutenant.
The two met in 1912, in the editorial office of Pravda, the Bolshevik newspaper. It took ten years before they began to collaborate closely. Stalin was then general secretary of the party, and Molotov, his deputy. In that position he stood out as a conscientious and loyal administrator. In the struggle for power that followed Lenin’s death he sided with Stalin, who generously rewarded his loyalty. In 1926, with promotion to the select Politburo club, and, four years later, with the head of the government.
If we listen to Trotsky, that promotion represented the triumph of a generation of mediocre bureaucrats, alien to the heroic lineage of the old Bolsheviks and more zealous of administrative rigor than of ideological convictions. Criticism aside, the truth is that, throughout the 1930s, Stalin and Molotov formed the tandem that shaped Soviet society.
The first defined the main lines of the policy from the party leadership, while the second supervised its execution by controlling government action. There was no initiative, no matter how traumatic, without the absolute support of Molotov. That is why he was as responsible as Stalin for the calamitous consequences of the collectivization of the countryside, and complicit in the massacres during the great purges. The archives attest to the hundreds of lists of death sentences signed by both.
In mid-1939, with hardly any diplomatic experience, he assumed the Foreign Ministry. From then on, he was Stalin’s alter ego at the negotiating tables and defended his will with infinite doses of firmness and patience. He closed the non-aggression pact with the Nazis that delayed the German invasion for almost two years. And when this occurred, he forged the alliance with the British and Americans that ensured victory.
At the end of the conflict he was at the zenith of his career. Only Stalin surpassed his international projection, and his stature as a statesman was recognized in the main chancelleries. However, his famous tenacity in negotiating did little to maintain collaboration with London and Washington in the construction of the postwar order. The great alliance faded, giving way to the division of the world into two blocks. The cold war had broken out.
1948 was its annus horribilis. The worst thing was not that he was left with honey on his lips after being nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, but the arrest of his wife. Polina Zhemchúzhina, a fervent Stalinist who had held high positions in the government, had long been in Stalin’s sights.
Her Jewish origin served as a pretext to falsely accuse her of spying for Israel. Sentenced to five years in a labor camp, Molotov did nothing to save her from prison. He even accepted the divorce that Stalin imposed on him, because before his love for her there was blind obedience to the party and unlimited devotion to its leader, who, not satisfied with this humiliation, dismissed him as Foreign Minister the following year.
His fall to hell did not stop there. In 1952, Stalin excluded him, first, from the Politburo, and then from his inner circle. He baselessly suspected that his most loyal lieutenant was a traitor. His life hung by a thread.
Although on March 5, 1953 he must have breathed a sigh of relief upon learning of Stalin’s death, he was the only one of his collaborators who was visibly moved during the funeral of someone he believed to be an irreplaceable giant. Power then passed to a collegiate leadership, with Georgi Malenkov as prime minister, Lavrenti Beria in charge of state security, and control of the party in the hands of Nikita Khrushchev.
Molotov regained the leadership of diplomacy. At sixty-three years old he was the oldest of the group, and, for most, Stalin’s worthy successor. But he was too accustomed to being number two and showed no intention of wanting to challenge the collective leadership. On the contrary, he did not hesitate to support Khrushchev to get rid of Beria when his initiatives threatened the balance of power in the group.
Until 1955 he vigorously sought détente with the West, trying to shape a system of collective security that would put an end to the Cold War. The stumbling block was the future of divided Germany. Fearing that the western part would rearm and join NATO, he was willing to accept a united and neutral Germany.
It was a concession that Khrushchev, who emerged as the strong man of the regime, rejected outright. As a result, the cold war became entrenched. In 1955 the Federal Republic of Germany joined NATO, and the following year his communist sister joined the Warsaw Pact.
Perhaps there were no two more antagonistic personalities in the leading group than those of the secretary general and the head of diplomacy. Khrushchev, expansive, impetuous and sometimes erratic, was the opposite of the self-control and refinement of the always inscrutable Molotov, who despised Khrushchev for his crudeness.
Those differences in character, surely, accentuated the political discrepancies that preluded their final confrontation. Molotov harshly criticized Khrushchev for ceding the Crimean peninsula, a historically Russian territory, to Ukraine. He also criticized the absurd waste of his campaign to cultivate vast wastelands of the country.
Khrushchev, for his part, took advantage of Molotov’s reluctance to approach Tito’s Yugoslavia to accuse him of maintaining outdated conceptions of international relations. In the end, behind those disputes lay the conflict between two political models: Stalinism, which Molotov represented, and its overcoming, which Khrushchev supported.
The final break came when Khrushchev decided to attack the figure of Stalin. Molotov accepted that his boss had made mistakes, but he also demanded recognition of his merits. None of that happened during the twentieth party congress, held in February 1956, which began de-Stalinization.
Khrushchev’s famous secret report, read behind closed doors, horrified delegates by revealing the magnitude of Stalin’s crimes. Molotov was not the only one in the party who interpreted that maneuver as a betrayal. Behind the scenes there were those who asked him to step forward and take the reins of the country.
De-Stalinization was advancing. After the congress, a commission was created to investigate the trials that, in the 1930s, eliminated the Bolshevik old guard, as well as the murder of Sergei Kirov, the head of the Leningrad party, which triggered the great purges. Khrushchev was confident that the results of the investigation would point to Stalin as the promoter of the assassination, which would weaken his loyalists in the party. But the conclusions of the commission, chaired by Molotov, confirmed the guilt of those executed, and ruled out that Stalin hatched any plot against Kirov.
That setback to Khrushchev’s anti-Stalinist offensive did not prevent Molotov’s dismissal as Foreign Minister, although he retained his position in the Politburo, from where he continued his opposition to the general secretary.
In the fall of 1956, the crisis in the communist regimes of Poland and Hungary further exacerbated the tense relations in the leadership. Khrushchev committed the imprudence of airing internal disagreements outside the party. That error, which crossed a red line of Bolshevik ethics, together with Khrushchev’s egocentric style in decision-making, contravening the norms of the collegiate leadership, convinced Molotov of the need to dismiss him. Georgi Malenkov and Lazar Kaganovich, Stalin’s former lieutenants, joined the initiative. The supporters of the coup were the majority in the Politburo, and from that body they launched their attack.
In June 1957, the heated Politburo meeting took place in which Khrushchev, after receiving a barrage of criticism and accusations, submitted his resignation. The triumph seemed like Molotov’s, but it was soon neutralized. For the resignation to be effective, it had to be ratified by the Central Committee, and the proportion of delegates in favor of the general secretary was overwhelming.
Khrushchev’s victory was a foregone conclusion. The Central Committee met for a week. Their sessions not only restored Khrushchev to his position, elevating him as absolute leader, they also became a political trial against the promoters of the coup attempt, then called the Anti-Party Group.
Molotov and his allies had wanted to put an end to de-Stalinization, but they ended up being its victims. They were accused of attacking party unity and being complicit in Stalin’s crimes. The defeat stripped them of their positions and sealed the end of their political careers.
With the fall came ostracism. Molotov was assigned to Mongolia as an ambassador. Then to Austria, with a less prominent position. Distance did not silence him, and he continued to denounce Khrushchev’s revisionism and his betrayal of Stalin, which earned him expulsion from the party in 1962. The worst punishment.
Away from all political activity since then, he repeatedly requested his reinstatement, until he obtained it in 1984. He died two years later, at the beginning of Gorbachev’s perestroika. His death went almost unnoticed. It was not an opportune time for posthumous recognition of an unwavering Stalinist.
