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Person1890 – 1986

Vyacheslav Molotov

Stalin’s close associate, Soviet premier (1930–1941) and foreign commissar, who signed the Nazi–Soviet Non-Aggression Pact in 1939

Born Skryabin, he took the revolutionary name Molotov, from the Russian word for “hammer”. A Bolshevik from 1906 who took part in the revolution, he stood at Stalin’s side and signed the papers of collectivization and the Great Purge. Appointed foreign commissar in 1939, he concluded the non-aggression pact with Germany, and during the war attended the Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam conferences. After Stalin’s death he opposed Khrushchev and was pushed out of power in 1957.

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3 related events

  1. 1
    1936 – 1938Stalin’s Great Purgerelated figure

    Claiming to root out “enemies of the people”, Stalin had Party officials, army commanders, intellectuals and ordinary citizens arrested en masse and shot or sent to the camps.

  2. 2
    1937Deportation of Soviet Koreans to Central Asiarelated figure

    Claiming they might spy for Japan, Stalin’s regime forcibly moved more than 170,000 Koreans from the Russian Far East, including the Maritime Province, to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

  3. 3
    1939Nazi–Soviet Non-Aggression Pactdiplomat

    Ideological enemies Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union promised not to attack each other and divided Eastern Europe in a secret protocol. Nine days later Germany invaded Poland.

People who appear alongside

  • Joseph Stalin1878 – 1953

    General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party who ruled the USSR from the late 1920s until his death, led the war against Germany and drew Eastern Europe into the Soviet bloc

  • Hong Beom-do1868 – 1943

    Commander of the Korean Independence Army who won at Bongo-dong and fought at Cheongsan-ri; died in Kazakhstan

  • Joachim von Ribbentrop1893 – 1946

    Nazi Germany’s foreign minister (1938–1945) who concluded the Anti-Comintern Pact and the Nazi–Soviet Pact; executed after the Nuremberg trials

  • Adolf Hitler1889 – 1945

    Nazi leader and Führer of Germany (1934–1945) who started the Second World War and perpetrated the Holocaust; he killed himself as Berlin fell

Themes this person appears in

  • The Great Depression and Totalitarianism1919 – 1939

    From the Washington Conference to the invasion of Poland — two decades in which the age of international cooperation collapsed in the Depression, fascism, Nazism and Stalinism rose, and the world slid into war again