Proclaimed scarcely three months ago, the coroner's verdict on Vyacheslav Molotov seemed final. "A political corpse!" shouted the chief of the Soviet secret police to the cheering delegates of the 22nd Party Congress. The public autopsy accused Old Stonebottom. for ten years Stalin's Foreign Minister, of complicity in Stalin's bloody purges and of plotting with Chinese and Albanian Communists against Khrushchev's current line of "peaceful coexistence" with capitalism. Denounced as a "bandit" and an "enemy of the party," Molotov, 71, was summoned back to Moscow from Vienna, where for the past...
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