Vyacheslav Molotov
Vyacheslav Molotov signed the pact with Ribbentrop, survived Stalin, and lived to be ninety-six. Born Skryabin in 1890 to a shop clerk's family, he took a revolutionary name from the word for hammer, joined the Bolsheviks at sixteen, was exiled twice, and helped found Pravda in 1912. He was in Petrograd in February 1917 and was on the party's cautious wing until Lenin returned. His career was built on being the most reliable administrator in the party and on attaching himself to Stalin early. He ran the secretariat, then the Moscow party, then the government from 1930 to 1941 as chairman of the council of people's commissars, which made him the formal head of the Soviet state during collectivisation, the famine and the terror. He signed execution lists personally, tens of thousands of names, and defended it to interviewers in the 1970s on the grounds that mistakes were unavoidable. He replaced Litvinov as foreign minister in May 1939 — Litvinov being Jewish and identified with collective security — which was itself a signal to Berlin, and signed the non-aggression pact in August. He then announced the German invasion on the radio in June 1941, negotiated the wartime alliances, and spent the postwar years as the immovable Soviet negotiator whom the West nicknamed Mr Nyet. Stalin had his wife arrested in 1949 and Molotov did not object. He was expelled from the party in 1962, readmitted in 1984, and died in 1986. The improvised petrol bomb was named for him sarcastically by the Finns.
- Lived: 1890 CE – 1986 CE
- Nationality: Soviet
- Roles: foreign_minister, statesman, communist
