Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov

In 1937-38, Vyacheslav Molotov, as Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, was a central agent of the Great Purge. He signed 372 documented execution lists. That is more than Stalin (357). Each list bore hundreds of names, and the Politburo leadership signed in sequence: Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, Zhdanov. From approval to execution, days might pass.

In 1938 alone, 20 of the 28 People's Commissars in Molotov's own government were arrested and executed. When his deputy Rudzutak was imprisoned, Molotov visited him and heard firsthand that he had been badly tortured. He did nothing. When a denunciation of Gosplan deputy chairman Lomov arrived, Molotov wrote on it: 'For immediate arrest of that bastard Lomov.'

The post-Stalin Shvernik Report named Molotov, alongside Stalin, as 'personally responsible for the organization and execution of groundless mass political repressions.' Late in life, in his conversations with Felix Chuev, Molotov said: 'Admittedly there were mistakes and excesses. But on the whole, the policy was correct. I have never regretted it, and will never regret it.'

On the night of 23 August 1939, Vyacheslav Molotov received Nazi Foreign Minister Ribbentrop in the Kremlin. Days earlier, it would have been unthinkable. Nazis and communists at the same table.

At Stalin's direction, Molotov signed the Non-Aggression Pact. A secret protocol divided Eastern Europe. Poland, the Baltic states, Finland, and Bessarabia were split into Soviet and German spheres. The signing took less than twenty minutes.

Molotov considered it his finest hour as People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs. The USSR gained two years to prepare for war and pushed its western border hundreds of kilometres forward. On 22 June 1941, Hitler tore the pact up.

Molotov defended it for the rest of his life: 'It was unavoidable, and the right decision.' Yet the name 'Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact' endures as twentieth-century diplomacy's most cynical moment.

After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Molotov joined the State Defense Committee and helped build the wartime alliance with Britain and the United States. Beginning with the Anglo-Soviet agreement of July 1941, his diplomacy institutionalized Allied cooperation while placing Soviet military and security demands on the negotiating table. It sought to prevent the USSR from being isolated in the antifascist war, but also prepared the postwar contest over security and influence in Eastern Europe.

Molotov attended the Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam conferences, as well as the 1945 San Francisco Conference. He firmly represented Soviet positions on German disarmament and reparations, Poland’s borders, and the political character of Eastern European governments, while helping sustain great-power agreement during the drafting of the UN Charter. His wartime diplomacy was therefore not merely a personal anti-Western posture, but the practical expression of a state strategy to secure the USSR and institutionalize the international standing of a socialist power. That strategy also left unresolved the conflict between Eastern European self-determination and Soviet security claims.

Molotov's later life after Stalin can be summed up as a fall from power and an unrepentance that lasted to the end. This phase, which the existing sections do not treat, is set out separately.

After Stalin's death in March 1953 a triumvirate of Malenkov, Beria and Molotov briefly governed; Molotov was reappointed Foreign Minister on 5 March 1953 and backed the removal and later execution of Beria. When Khrushchev denounced Stalin at the 20th Party Congress in February 1956, Molotov, the most senior surviving purge collaborator left in government, became the leader of an old-guard faction.

In June 1956 he was removed as Foreign Minister. On 29 June 1957, after a failed attempt to oust Khrushchev, he was expelled from the party Presidium and demoted to ambassador to the Mongolian People's Republic. His faction is reported to have initially carried a Presidium vote of 7-4 to remove Khrushchev, but Khrushchev refused to resign unless a Central Committee plenum decided; the plenum of 22-29 June defeated the faction. The defeated group was denounced as the 'Anti-Party Group' but, unlike in the Stalin years, was not physically liquidated.

The date of his expulsion is disputed. English Wikipedia dates the removal from all positions, and the expulsion from the party, to after the 22nd Party Congress in 1961, and says his party documents were destroyed in 1962. Russian Wikipedia states that he was excluded from the CPSU in 1962 and restored in 1984. The section does not fix a single year.

In 1960 he was appointed Soviet representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency, read as a partial rehabilitation (Russian Wikipedia gives the posting as 1960-1963). That the 22nd Congress resolution devoted nearly four times more space to attacking the Anti-Party Group than to criticising Stalin's personality cult, with the heaviest criticism falling on Molotov, is A. V. Pyzhikov's assessment and is presented as one scholar's judgement rather than a neutral consensus.

In retirement he remained unrepentant about his role under Stalin. He suffered a heart attack in January 1962, and after the Sino-Soviet split he was reported to agree with Mao Zedong's criticisms of Khrushchev's supposed revisionism. He continued to deny that there had been a secret territorial deal between Stalin and Hitler, and never recognised the Cold War as an international event, treating it as the everyday conflict between communism and capitalism.

Under Brezhnev, information about him reappeared in Soviet encyclopaedias, and the 'Anti-Party Group' reference was dropped by the mid-to-late 1970s. Chernenko further rehabilitated him, and in 1984 Molotov was allowed to seek membership in the Communist Party. He died in Moscow on 8 November 1986 aged 96, having suffered seven heart attacks, and was buried in Novodevichy Cemetery; at his death he was the last surviving major participant in the events of 1917.

No individual spent more time in official meetings with Stalin: 2,927 meetings, 8,169 hours, 76.5 per cent of Stalin's official meetings. That is a documented basis for describing him as the closest associate rather than a marginal figure, while his refusal to recant to the end keeps the question of responsibility for the repression in view. Where the sources disagree, on the expulsion year and on the 1957 vote figures, the section gives the attributed alternatives instead of a single figure.