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Alias Mr. Brown. In May 1939, while still Premier, Molotov succeeded Maxim Litvinoff as Foreign Commissar. Three-and-a-half months later he shocked the world with the Nazi-Soviet pact. Both sides solemnly swore to "refrain from every aggressive action"; the effect was that the Reich was free to attack the democracies while Russia grabbed half of Poland and the Baltic Republics: Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia. Then Hitler invaded Russia. Talking before Allied diplomats, Stalin would speak to Molotov of "your treaty with Ribbentrop." Stalin startled Sir Stafford Cripps by offering to sack Molotov, if the British wished.
Molotov's wartime role was to win friends for the Soviet Union. He did it well. As "Mr. Smith," he flew to London to sign a 20-year treaty of alliance that is still, theoretically, the basis of Anglo-Soviet relations. Winston Churchill put him up in his country home at Chequers, and wrote afterwards: "Molotov's room [was] thoroughly searched by his police officers . . . The mattresses were all prodded in case of infernal machines. At night a revolver was laid out beside his dressing gown and his dispatch case."
From Britain, Mr. Smith flew on to Washington, where he boarded for three nights at the White House as "Mr. Brown." Six months later, at a Kremlin conference, Stalin told a visitor that the Foreign Minister of Russia had been gallivanting in Chicago, "where the other gangsters live."
Baiting Aunty Molly was one of Stalin's pet pastimes during World War II. To General de Gaulle, who went to Moscow to negotiate a Franco-Soviet treaty, Stalin wisecracked: "You are a hard bargainer. You got the better of Molotov. I think we shall have to shoot him." Frenchman and Russian laughed until they noticed Molotov white with fear.
Molly's Offensive. As Foreign Minister, Molotov has made his mistakes, some of them thumping big ones. He misread Tito, lost the airlift battle of Berlin, mis judged U.S. reaction to the invasion of South Korea. Above all, he and his "fellow Politburocrats allowed the nakedness of Communist aggression to alert the West to rearm. To undo that "error" is now the principal external target of Russia's peace offensive.
The British Foreign Office believes that the Communist objectives are four:
1) The breakdown of NATO.
2) The neutralization of Germany.
3) The end of Nationalist China.
4) A break between the U.S. and her foreign allies.
Most of all, a period of cold peace—what Stalin called "an ebb in the revolutionary tide"—would give the new men in the Kremlin time to settle down.
Who Is No. 1 ? They seem to need it badly. A good many Western observers no longer accept as fact what once seemed so plain: the direct transference of authority from Stalin to Malenkov. That original assumption leaves too many later developments unexplained: e.g., the abandonment by Malenkov of the key job of Secretary of the Communist Party, and the conspicuous absence of any personal buildup of Malenkov.