Vyacheslav Molotov

Now, this is probably my favorite part of the story.

So he would have these mad dinners, Caligula-esque, right, where he'd get this small circle of leaders, Beria, Khrushchev, Molotov, Malenkov, all the kind of basically the top brass that he hasn't killed.

All of the Death of

Stalin cast, basically.

It's like when the Queen died and they can only play sad songs on the radio.

So then we get to the secession struggles, which obviously, if you've seen The Death of Stalin, that's how that plays out.

Malenkov, Beria, Molotov and Khrushchev.

Now, Beria is the most dangerous man because he'd run the security service and he knows where everything's buried.

I want to meet that guy.

pro-Nazi Jew, that he was removed and he was replaced with Vashislav Molotov, one of Stalin's most loyal lieutenants.

Who's played

by Jeffrey Tambor in The Death of Stalin.

Yes.

And is that the Molotov cocktail guy or is that someone else? It was the Molotov cocktail, but he didn't

invent the Molotov cocktail.

He didn't? It was just some slightly boring reason.

This left a power vacuum, and the men who'd spent their careers surviving Stalin now had to survive each other.

Alongside Beria, Malenkov, Khrushchev, and Ghanin stood veteran Stalinists including Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, Clement Voroshilov, and Anastas Mikoyan.

That was a mouthful of a sentence.

These were hardly innocent officials unfortunate enough to work for a monster.

Let's get into it.

So first up, let's meet our players.

shall we? Perhaps the most extraordinary survivor sitting near the top of the Soviet system in 1953 was Vyacheslav Molotov.

Molotov had worked alongside Stalin for decades.

It's a little after three in the afternoon, November 28th, 1943, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his entourage are just getting settled in at the gorgeous Yellow Mansion, currently serving as the Soviet embassy in Tehran, Iran.

Now, FDR had planned to stay elsewhere, but after a vague warning from Soviet Foreign Commissar Vyacheslav Molotov about Nazi agents, possibly even an assassination plot, plans changed.

So, here the Americans are, unpacking all over again.

But as they do, there's a knock at the door.

syncopated um you know that that kind of thing's going on so i i really like that that percussion track it's just different gives a new colorful element to this record it's good

Vyacheslav Molotov, one of the last of the original Bolsheviks, has died in Moscow at the age of 96.

For more than a quarter of a century, Molotov was Stalin's right-hand man.

The son of a shopkeeper, Molotov joined Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin in the 1917 Revolution.

Not surprisingly, they were afraid of history.

It is obvious that the leaders most threatened by Khrushchev thaw were men like Voroshilov, Molotov, Malenkov, and Kaganovich.

But there were others like Ivan Serov, the first post-Stalin head of the KGB, and Mikhail Suzlov, who would be one of Brezhnev's fiercest fighters against Nikita.

If these men had so much power, what motivated them to have such a great deal of fear? Part of it was how they participated in the prosecution of Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg trials.

This doesn't seem easy to understand at first, but bear me out.

Roman Rodenko, Khrushchev's prosecutor general, was the lead Soviet prosecutor at those trials.

When Khrushchev went after Molotov, Kaganovich, and Malenkov in June 1957, accusing them of being responsible for the arrest of 1.5 million people and over 38,000 executions… There was a furor among many of the Soviet Nuremberg.

While this never occurred, repercussions did.

There are plenty of other wines attached to Stalin's name, Kindzmarauli, Mukuzani, Tsinandali, and the mythology gets complicated very quickly.

His longtime colleague, Vyacheslav Molotov, actually remembered Stalin as drinking relatively little wine and sometimes preferring a small amount of brandy.

That detail matters because Stalin's dinners weren't exactly relaxed evenings among friends.

They could last for hours.

German armies advancing 60 kilometers into the Baltic states, 40 into Belarus.

When Foreign Minister Schulenburg delivered Germany's declaration of war, citing threats to their eastern border, Molotov could only stammer.

Why did Germany sign a non-aggression pact only to break it so easily? Stalin refused to address the nation.

He sat in his office, growing smaller somehow.

Zhukov later remembered, the shock to Stalin caused by the enemy invasion was so strong that his voice even became softer.

Molotov gave the famous radio address instead.

Our cause is just.

The enemy will be crushed.

OK, let's unpack this.

The Soviet foreign minister at the time, Vyacheslav Molotov, he decides to throw a massive diplomatic curveball to stop this from happening.

Yeah, he proposes reunifying Germany and holding pan-German elections.

But with one absolute condition, right? This new unified Germany must remain strictly neutral and all occupying armies have to pack up and withdraw.