Molotov chose a name meaning hammer and became Stalin's most enduring lieutenant
Born Vyacheslav Skryabin, a shy merchant's son renamed himself after the Russian word for sledgehammer because it sounded industrial. Rivals such as Trotsky dismissed him as mediocrity personified. He outlasted nearly all of them, running Stalin's government through collectivisation and famine, and defended Stalin for decades after the dictator died.
He was born on 9 March 1890 in Kukarka, in the Vyatka region, and helped in his father's business as a quiet teenager. Despite a persistent myth, there is no evidence he was related to the composer Alexander Scriabin. At school in Kazan he met revolutionaries, signed up with the Marxist Social Democrats in 1906 and drifted to Lenin's Bolsheviks. Arrested in 1909, he spent two years exiled in Vologda; in 1911 he joined the staff of the underground newspaper Pravda, where he first met Stalin.
When the February Revolution broke out in 1917 he was one of the few senior Bolsheviks in the capital, and he steered Pravda against the Provisional Government. Lenin later put him in charge of the party secretariat in 1921, though he also scolded him for shameful bureaucratism. After Stalin became General Secretary in 1922, Molotov served as his de facto deputy and backed him against every rival in turn, from Trotsky to Bukharin. Colleagues joked that he was Stone Arse; he pedantically insisted Lenin had called him Iron Arse.
He became a full Politburo member in 1926 and head of government in 1930, holding that post until 1941. He oversaw the First Five-Year Plan's forced industrialisation and was chief speaker at the November 1929 meeting that decided to collectivise peasant farming. Even as famine spread in September 1931, he secretly complained that grain collection in the North Caucasus was going disgustingly slowly, and in Kharkov he brushed aside local warnings about shortages.
From 1939 he also served as foreign minister, and he returned to that job after Stalin's death in 1953. Opposing Nikita Khrushchev's de-Stalinisation, he joined a failed attempt to oust him in 1957, lost all his posts and was sent as ambassador to Mongolia. The party expelled him by 1961. He died on 8 November 1986, still loyal to Stalin's memory.
Source: Vyacheslav Molotov
