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-owningfarmers). 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 ofthe 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 in1986, aged 96. Not a bad record for somebody whom a British historian, D.C. Watt, described as "one of themost inexorably stupid men to hold the foreign ministership of any major power in this century." That judgmentis inaccurate, as this book shows. Molotov was the supreme apparatchik. Stalin ordered him to divorce hiswife. Molotov complied--only to be reunited with her after Stalin's death. Resilience guided by intuitive cunning ensured his endurance, but only just. "I think that if he [Stalin] had remained alive another year, I would not have survived." For all that, Molotov remained to the last an unrepentantStalinist, defending without equivocation everything Stalin did and stood for. Felix Chuev, a Russian biographer and an admirer of Molotov, painstakingly recorded conversations with his hero in meetings stretching over a period of 17 years. These conversations have been edited for this book by Albert Resis, an American historian. Although some...
