The Vyacheslav Molotov Book Report

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Recommended: Rise of Stalin

The Vyacheslav Molotov Book Report

For much of the time between 1930 and 1952, Vyacheslav Molotov, a laconic, unsmiling man called Mr Nyet behind his back by western diplomats, was second only to Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union. He played a decisiverole in the famine of 1932, during which millions of peasants died of starvation and disease. He was instrumental in liquidating the kulaks (the land-owning farmers). He was Stalin's faithful henchman during the

Great Terror, in 1936-38, when both the Red Army command and the country's political leadership were decimated. His name is on the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939, which kept the Soviet Union out of the war until it was attacked by Hitler two years later. His final years as a power in the land encompassed some of the chilliest days of the cold war.Nikita Khrushchev, Molotov's rival, sent him out of harm's way, as ambassador to Outer Mongolia. In 1962 Molotov was expelled from the party but he was re-instated in 1984. Having served Lenin and Stalin, he died a pensioner in 1986, aged 96. Not a bad record for somebody whom a British historian, D.C. Watt, described as "one of the

most inexorably stupid men to hold the foreign minister ship of any major power in this century." That judgment is inaccurate, as this book shows. Molotov was the supreme apparatchik. Stalin ordered him to divorce his wife. Molotov complied--only to be reunited with her after Stalin's death. Resilience guided by intuitive cunning ensured ...

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