Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics

During the seventy years of Soviet communism, after Lenin and Stalin no person occupied a higher position over a longer period of time than V. M. Molotov. Lenin and Stalin left no memoirs; now we have Molotov Remembers . These memoirs, in the form of conversations with the poet-biographer Felix Chuev over seventeen years before Molotov’s death in 1986, offer an incomparable view of the politics of Soviet society and the nature of Kremlin leadership under communism. Beginning with his early revolutionary activities, Molotov recounts his comradeship with Lenin, the Bolshevik seizure of power, and the perilous years of Soviet rule. First at Lenin’s then at Stalin’s right hand, premier and then foreign minister, he offers startling insights into the New Economic Policy; the collectivization of peasant farms and the liquidation of the kulaks; the repression of “counterrevolutionaries” in the late 1930s; the making of the Nazi-Soviet pact; World War II diplomacy with the Allies; the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe; and the rise and fall of Khrushchev. His portraits of an indomitable Lenin; a crafty, brutal, and ultimately paranoiac Stalin; and a host of other Soviet leaders are indelibly drawn from firsthand experience. Molotov Remembers is not only a major publishing event but a historical source of the highest order, throwing fight on the politics and psychology of the most influential episode of the twentieth century.