Leader
Vyacheslav Molotov
Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Skryabin · 1890–1986
TASS portrait. Wikimedia Commons.
Molotov signed what Stalin decided: famine procurement, execution lists, and the 1939 pact with Nazi Germany that divided Eastern Europe.
Origin and religion
Born in Kukarka, Vyatka province, to a Russian family. He took the name Molotov, from molot, the hammer. No relation that mattered to the composer Scriabin. He was the gray clerk of spectacular crimes, which is why textbooks that only teach the Nazi–Soviet pact still under-teach him.
Russian family. Atheist.
Responsibilities
- Chairman of Sovnarkom, 1930–1941
- People’s commissar for foreign affairs
- Signatory of grain and terror decisions
As head of the government in the famine years he carried quotas into Ukraine and the other grain regions and brushed aside reports of starvation. He negotiated the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (23 August 1939) and its secret protocol. With Stalin he approved long lists of names marked for shooting during the Great Terror.
The record
In old age he spoke to the poet Feliks Chuev. The conversations, published as Molotov Remembers, are a primary source for the mind of the regime: he defended signing the lists and treated mercy as a mistake. He was expelled from the party in 1961 with Kaganovich and died in 1986, still a Stalinist.
What they said
Late in life Molotov told Feliks Chuev that he and Stalin had personally signed execution lists, and he defended that work as necessary. The interviews are boastful and self-serving. They are still his own voice, not an enemy’s invention.
Others filed as Russian
- Nikolai Bukharin — Editor of Pravda
- Nikolai Yezhov — People’s commissar of internal affairs, 1936–1938
- Nikolai Krylenko — Briefly supreme commander after October
Evidence marks such as Opened archive are explained in How to read.