Vyacheslav Molotov
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Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov (\Вячесла́в Миха́йлович Мо́лотов, February 25, 1890 - November 8, 1986) was a Soviet politician. Molotov and Stalin himself were the only senior revolutionary Bolsheviks to survive the Great Purges of the 1930s.
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| Molotov (left) and Stalin at the Yalta Conference |
He was born in
Kukarka,
Russia, as
Vyacheslav Scriabin (
Скря́бин; he was a relative of the composer
Alexander Scriabin). He joined the
Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in
1906 and took the
pseudonym Molotov (from Russian:
hammer). He was, along with
Alexander Shlyapnikov, the senior
Bolshevik in
Petrograd at the time of the
February Revolution as figures such as
Lenin were still in exile. After what appears to be an
odyssey through the landscape of geographic and political Russia including an important role in the
October Revolution and editing the newspaper
Pravda for a while, he started working under
Joseph Stalin in
1922. At the eve of
World War II, he became
People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs (Foreign Minister). After
British-
French-
Soviet talks held in August of 1939 failed, he negotiated the
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with his
German counterpart,
Joachim von Ribbentrop.
He later served as ambassador to Mongolia and as the permanent Soviet delegate to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.
Molotov died at the age of 96 on November 8, 1986, in Moscow, USSR, two years after the Communist Party rehabilitated him for his involvement in an attempted coup in 1957. Molotov was the last surviving major participant in the events of 1917.
Soldiers of the Finnish Army mockingly named the Molotov cocktail after him, as Molotov served as the Commissar for Foreign Affairs during the time of the Russo-Finnish War (1939-1940).
