Vyacheslav Molotov was one of Joseph Stalin's closest and most durable lieutenants, the dour, hard-working bureaucrat who served as Soviet foreign minister through some of the most fateful episodes of the twentieth century. Born in Russia, he joined the Bolsheviks as a young man and rose steadily through the party apparatus, becoming a loyal and tireless servant of Stalin's regime.
As the Soviet head of government in the 1930s, Molotov was deeply implicated in the collectivization of agriculture and the Great Purge, signing death lists without apparent qualm. In 1939 he became foreign minister, and his name was soon attached to one of the most shocking acts of diplomacy of the century.
That August, Molotov negotiated the non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany — the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact — whose secret protocols carved up Eastern Europe between Hitler and Stalin and cleared the way for the outbreak of the Second World War. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, he helped rally the wartime alliance with Britain and the United States and took part in the great Allied conferences.
After the war Molotov was a rigid and combative figure in the early Cold War, defending Soviet interests with such stubbornness that Western diplomats marveled at his intransigence. He fell from favor after Stalin's death, was sidelined by Khrushchev, and was eventually expelled from the party, living on in obscurity until his death in 1986 at the age of ninety-six.