Vyacheslav Molotov

Molotov married Polina Zhemchuzhina in 1921. From 1932 to 1936, she served as the director of the Soviet National cosmetics trust. Later, she served as the Minister of Fisheries as well as the head of Textile Production in the Ministry of Light Industry.

As she was a supporter of Zionism, she was arrested for treason in 1948, and sentenced to five years in a labor camp. She was released in 1953, shortly after Stalin’s death. She was then reunited with Molotov and the couple lived together until her death in 1970.

Molotov passed away on 8 November 1986, after being hospitalized in the Kuntsevo Hospital in Moscow. He was 96 at the time of his demise.

Molotov was born as Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Skyrabin on 9th March 1890 in a village named Kukarta in Vyatka Governorate in the Russian Empire. He studied at a secondary school in Kazan, and also assisted his father, who was a butler churner, in his business.

Vyacheslav Molotov joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1906. He was soon attracted to the radical Bolshevik faction of the organization, which was headed by Vladimir Lenin. He got involved with the party’s revolutionary activities for which he was arrested twice (in 1909 and 1915). He also had to spend a few years in exile.

He enrolled at the St Petersburg Polytechnic Institute in 1911. During his involvement with an underground Bolshevik newspaper named ‘Pravada,’ he got acquainted with Joseph Stalin for the first time.

Molotov eventually gained prominence during the Russian Revolution. After the Bolsheviks gained power in 1917, he was involved with several provincial party organizations over the next few years.

Vyacheslav Molotov was sent to Ukraine in 1918 as the civil war was breaking out; however, as he was not a military man, he didn’t take part in the fighting. Two years later, he was appointed the secretary to the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Bolshevik Party. A year later, he was called to Moscow again by Lenin, and was put in charge of the party secretariat.

His tenure as the secretary was however heavily criticized by Vladimir Lenin as well as Leon Trotsky. After Joseph Stalin became the General Secretary of the Bolshevik Party, Molotov gave his full support to his mentor. He also became Stalin’s chief agent in agricultural policy. Molotov became a full member of the Politburo in 1926, and continued his work in the Secretariat till 1930.

In 1930, he was elected Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissioners, a post considered equal to that of a Prime Minister. In this post, Molotov used to oversee the collectivization of agriculture under Stalin’s regime. Like Stalin, he used force and propaganda as a tool to crush the resistance of the peasants to collectivization. Millions of peasants who owned property were deported to the gulags.

The death of Sergei Kirov, the head of the party organization in Leningrad, led to the Great Purge over the course of which 20 out of the 28 People’s Commisars in Molotov’s Government were executed on Stalin’s and Molotov’s orders. Whenever Stalin required Molotov to sign the death warrants of prominent purge victims, Molotov would always do so without questioning.

There is no record of Molotov trying to moderate the course of the Purge or trying to save individuals as some other Soviet officers did. Molotov is known to have approved 372 documented execution lists. Even after Stalin’s death, Molotov continued to support the Great Purge as well as the executions carried out by his government.