Essay, Research Paper: 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 decisive
role 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 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 unrepentant
Stalinist, 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 of
the material is uninteresting, a lot of it is both
significant and fascinating. The book is organised not
chronologically but according to topics. This helps
impart a more vivid, comprehensive impression of
Molotov and his times. On international affairs,
Molotov is typically epigrammatic. In the sections
"With Lenin" and "With Stalin", he is almost expansive.
Although you feel that Mr Chuev is far too easy on his
subject throughout, here the book really comes to life.
The central message in all that Molotov has to say is
that Stalin was right. Molotov himself predicts: In
time, Stalin will be rehabilitated in history. There
will be a Stalin museum in Moscow. Without fail! By
popular demand. The role of Stalin was tremendous. I do
not doubt that his name will rise again and duly win
a glorious place in history. In 1991 Terra, a leading
Moscow publisher, printed 300,000 copies of an earlier
version of this book. In his introduction, Mr Resis
suggests that its publication was "intended to rally
neo-Stalinists and other hard-liners in a movement to
oust Gorbachev and establish a quasi-Stalinist
regime." The results of Russia's elections presumably
came as less of a surprise to the publishers than to
many western commentators.


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