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Red Conversion. "Molotov" is an underground pseudonym (Molot means hammer). Molotov was born Scriabin, the son of a store clerk in the village of Kukarka. At a sacrifice, the family sent him to gymnasia (high school) in nearby Kazan, to college in distant Petrograd. There the backwash of the bloody revolution of 1905 hit and converted him. At 1 6 he was a full-fledged, poster-writing, bomb-making revolutionary. At 19 he had been jailed, exiled.
Before the Red tide swept him into power eight years later, Molotov had been arrested six times, exiled twice, escaped from exile once. He went underground, organized railroad workers, studied Marxism, made friends. Among the latter was a dark, sturdy Georgian named Stalin. Molotov helped Stalin to publish Pravda, then the official organ of the Bolshevik underground.
In 1912, so the tale goes, 22-year-old Molotov fell in love with a girl in a boarding school. Climbing over a fence to meet his inamorata, he was captured by an alert guard. The price of the romance was expulsion from the university, later rescinded.
The revolution found Molotov hiding in Petrograd, with a faked passport. He led the armed workers into the streets, seized power, organized a Soviet regime. Impressed, Lenin sent him scooting all over hungry and devastated Russia to organize and purge.
By 1924, the Stalin-Trotsky feud reached a near-explosive point. In this tug of war, Molotov sided with his great and good friend Stalin.
The struggle was long and costly. After it ended, Molotov was rewarded with the Premiership, which he held for eleven turbulent years (1930-41). During these years, he graduated from machine politics to statesmanship. He fathered the collectivization of Russia's farms, helped to put through the first two Five-Year Plans, worked on the new Constitution.
By 1939, the world crisis began to overshadow all else in the Russian mind. For the key job in the Foreign Commissariat, Stalin picked his top trouble shooter, Molotov. This was more than a change of faces in Narkomindel (Foreign Office). It was an about-face in Russian policy, from collective security to the two-fisted stand urged by Molotov and his fellow advisers.
In pursuit of this policy, Stalin and Molotov welcomed Joachim von Ribbentrop to the Kremlin and launched out upon the Soviet Union's brief and fateful course of collaboration with Nazi Germany. Five weeks before Hitler attacked the U.S.S.R., Stalin took over the Premiership from Molotov, assigned him primarily to Foreign Affairs. In May 1942 Foreign Commissar Molotov climbed into a four-motored bomber, flew west to seek friends.
In London, he was known as "Mr. Smith." In Eden's room on May 26, Molotov signed (with Churchill's pen) a 20-year pact which is still the basis of Anglo-Soviet Union relations.
In Washington, officials called him "Mr. Brown." He signed no pact, returned to Russia with the hypocritical and widely misunderstood statement of "complete agreement on the urgency of a second front in 1942." As the record later showed, there was no agreement, no promise; for their different purposes, President Roosevelt and the Russians had bamboozled their own peoples and the world.