V.M. Molotov

VYACHESLAV MIKHAILOVICH MOLOTOV, 1890-1986), Soviet Communist leader who was particularly prominent in international affairs. He was born in Kukarka, Vyatka province, Russia (Sovetsk, Kirov oblast, Russia), on March 9, 1890. His family name was Skryabin. He adopted the pseudonym Molotov early in his career as a revolutionary.

Molotov began his political activity as a student in Kazan during the Revolution of 1905 and joined the Bolsheviks in 1906. Three years later he was arrested and exiled to the north of Russia for a two-year term. In 1912 he joined Joseph STALIN in founding the party newspaper Pravda. Exiled to Siberia in 1915, he escaped a year later and helped to plan the 1917 revolution.

After the revolution, Molotov rose rapidly in party ranks. In 1921 he became secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist party. He supported Stalin in his bid for power after Lenin's death in 1924. He was rewarded in 1926 by being made a full member of the Politburo. He became chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, equivalent to premier, in 1930. (He held this post until 1941 when Stalin assumed the post, making Molotov deputy premier.) In 1939 he was appointed commissar of foreign affairs (foreign minister), and as such negotiated the nonaggression pact with Germany in August 1939. After the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 and the alliance of the Soviet Union with the Western democracies, he attended the Allied conferences at Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdam, and the San Francisco Conference, which organized the United Nations. He headed the Soviet delegation to the United Nations until 1949.

Molotov was succeeded as foreign minister by Andrei Y. Vyshinsky in 1949, but he retained the post of deputy premier under Stalin. After the latter's death in 1953, he became foreign minister once more. He represented the USSR at the major international conferences in the next two years.

In June 1956, allegedly at his own request, Molotov resigned as foreign minister. He was made minister of state control--a post comparable to U.S. comptroller general. A bitter conflict between Molotov and Nikita S. Khrushchev (then first secretary of the Central Committee) came to a head in June 1957, and in July, Khrushchev announced Molotov's dismissal from all his posts and expulsion from the Central Committee and the Presidium. He served as ambassador to Mongolia for a brief time and in 1960-1961 held a technical position in Vienna. He was expelled from the Communist party in 1962 but was reinstated as a member in 1984. Molotov died in Moscow on Nov. 8, 1986.