Molotov, Vyacheslav

Molotov, Vyacheslav (Mikhaylovich)

 orig. Vyacheslav Mikhaylovich Skryabin

(born March 9, 1890, Kukarka, Russia—died Nov. 8, 1986, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.) Soviet political leader. A member of the Bolsheviks from 1906, he worked in provincial Communist Party organizations from 1917. A staunch supporter of Joseph Stalin, he became secretary of the Central Committee in 1921. Promoted to the Politburo in 1926, he purged the Moscow party organization of anti-Stalinists (1928–30). He served as prime minister (1930–41) and as the country's foreign minister (1939–49, 1953–56). He negotiated the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact in 1939, and in World War II he ordered the production of the crude bottle bombs later called “Molotov cocktails.” He arranged the alliances with the U.S. and Britain and was the Soviet spokesman at the Allied conferences during and after the war. After being dismissed in 1956 by Nikita Khrushchev, Molotov joined an unsuccessful attempt to depose Khrushchev (1957) and lost all his party offices; in 1962 he was expelled from the Communist Party.