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Party Strategist Leon Trotsky once dismissed him as "mediocrity incarnate," but the plodding and diligent Molotov was shrewd enough to ally himself with Stalin in the power struggle that followed the death of Lenin in 1924. A member of the Politburo, he became nominal head of the Soviet government in 1930 and held the job until 1941, when Stalin assumed the post. During his tenure, Molotov unflinchingly carried out the heavy industrialization drive and brutal collectivization of farming decreed by the Kremlin and countersigned many of the orders that sent millions to their deaths in prisons and labor camps. Molotov, said Kremlinologist George Kennan, was "the perfect tool of his master and of the party, the nearest thing known to a human machine."
Given the portfolio of Foreign Minister in 1939, Molotov negotiated and signed the Soviet-German Nonaggression Pact, which prepared the way for the invasion of Poland and the beginning of World War II. He was the only Soviet leader to shake Hitler's hand. After the Nazi juggernaut turned against the Soviet Union two years later, Molotov served as the Kremlin's liaison with the Allied forces in the war against Germany. When Molotov traveled to the U.S. in 1942 to conduct negotiations under the Lend-Lease agreement, he spent nervous nights as a guest at the White House, bringing his own sausage, black bread and a pistol. He was also present at Allied conferences in Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam that shaped postwar Europe.
When his Jewish wife Polina Zhemchuzhina came under suspicion in the 1948-49 campaign against "rootless cosmopolitans," Molotov passively accepted her arrest and banishment, explaining later that it had been a matter of "party discipline." Toward the end of his life, Stalin grew convinced that Molotov had been recruited as an "agent of American imperialism." But he was spared when Stalin died before taking any action. After Khrushchev had consolidated his power, he banished Molotov from the Kremlin's inner circle in 1957, for plotting against the party, and posted him to Mongolia as ambassador. In 1961 Molotov served briefly as Soviet representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency. An unrepentant Stalinist, he was stripped of party membership the following year, and his name was removed from countless towns and buildings across the country. Molotov disappeared from public view into the solitude of his official dacha in the elite Moscow suburb of Zhukovka.
The old Bolshevik was never completely disgraced and was even reinstated in the party-membership rolls at the age of 94 while Konstantin Chernenko was in power. In an unusual portrait published last July in a Moscow English-language weekly, Molotov was depicted as a supporter of the reforms introduced by Communist Party Leader Mikhail Gorbachev. "I am inspired by the changes currently taking place in our life," he said. "It is a pity that my age and health prevent me from taking an active part in it." For those who had felt the blows of Stalin's hammer, Molotov's declining years of cultivating the rose garden at his dacha were surely the better ones.