BIOGRAPHY:Molotov: Stalin's Cold Warrior, by Geoffrey Roberts, Potomac Books, 230pp, £23.50
GEOFFREY ROBERTS, head of the history department at University College Cork, had written seven books on subjects related to the former Soviet Union before embarking on his biography of Vyacheslav Molotov. He has, therefore, approached his subject armed with a detailed knowledge of the background against which Molotov lived his life.
His biography is significant in shining new light on a subject obfuscated in the public mind by propagandists from the western side when Molotov was the best-known face of Soviet foreign policy. Armed with access to the Soviet archives and a knowledge of the Russian language that allowed him make his own translations of the relevant documents, Roberts reveals a Molotov who is different, if not entirely so, from the “Mr Nyet” of the Cold War.
In this work, Roberts goes beyond the received wisdom that Molotov, as Stalin’s right-hand man, was a dour automaton with no thoughts of his own other than to obey Stalin’s every command. The relationship, Roberts believes, was a great deal more complicated than that. Molotov was indeed painstaking in implementing Stalin’s policies and was unbending in his belief in communist ideology; but he had his own views, which frequently differed from those of his fellow party leaders. Most importantly, Molotov is shown as a force against confrontation and in favour of peaceful coexistence at a time when the nuclear arms race threatened the annihilation of humanity.
To many, Molotov’s name is most strongly associated with the Molotov-Ribbentrop non- aggression pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. After the second World War, the pact became one of the West’s most useful anti-Soviet publicity weapons, in which the Nazis and the Soviets were shown to have cynically carved up Poland between them, with little or no regard for the Polish people.
Molotov’s case was not only that the pact bought the USSR time before it was inevitably invaded, but that the parts of Poland occupied by the Soviets included sizeable Ukrainian and Belorussian populations. In Roberts’s view, there was more than a germ of truth in this as “much of the non-Polish population (Jews as well as the Belorussians and Ukrainians) welcomed the Red Army as liberators and as their protectors from the Germans”. But the honeymoon was a short one.
When the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union eventually took place, it was Molotov, not Stalin, who went on air to rally the people, arousing suggestions that Stalin was so shocked that he was unable to do so himself. Roberts’s research has found nothing to justify this claim, but the suspicion remains, not only in the West but in the minds of some Russians, too.
The section of the book likely to be most surprising to westerners is that which concerns Molotov’s role in the Cold War. Roberts concludes from his research that while Molotov, as a good diplomat, implemented Stalin’s policies, his personal preference was for peaceful coexistence with the West and a curtailment of the Cold War.
The book also illustrates the contradictions between Molotov’s public and private lives: he had a deep affection for his wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina, but apparently accepted her imprisonment; he appeared to love his children and grandchildren, but was ruthless with those who strayed from the party line.
These contradictions are borne out by my own experience. In 1997 I spoke to his grandson Vyacheslav Nikonov, a centrist political commentator known to the communists as “the little grandson of the big grandfather”. Nikonov’s most striking memory of his grandfather was of a holiday in Crimea when he was just three years old. He fell into the sea and was on the point of drowning. His grandfather immediately dived in to save him.
Later, when the Soviet Union fell and its archives were opened, Nikonov discovered that the kind old man who had saved his life once spent the best part of a day signing 3,100 death warrants and then, when he had finished, calmly went to the pictures with Stalin.
Stalin, of course, had his own way of making sure his subordinates behaved as he wanted. Molotov’s wife was held in Lubyanka prison in Moscow for a year and then for a further five years in exile in Kazakhstan. “That was the way he was kept in line. He wasn’t the only one. This sort of thing happened to people under Stalin. Mikhail Kalinin’s wife was locked away too, and he was the president,” Nikonov told me.
When Stalin died, Molotov’s first act was to go directly to Lavrentiy Beria, the head of the secret police, and make the simple demand: “Get Polina back.”
Séamus Martin is a retired international editor and Moscow correspondent of The Irish Times
