Molotov Back in News--After 25 Years

Vyacheslav Molotov, foreign minister under late dictator Josef Stalin, broke 25 years of silence today with a brief interview in a Soviet newspaper, endorsing the changes under Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

“I keep abreast of all events,” the newspaper Moscow News quoted Molotov, 96, as saying. “I am inspired by the change currently taking place in our life.

“It’s a pity that my age and health prevent me from taking any active part in it,” he said. “The older one gets, the more he wishes to be useful to the society.”

The newspaper did not mention details of Molotov’s past in bringing about the Bolshevik Revolution and his role in Soviet diplomacy but described him as still having a strong interest in communist ideology and as reading six hours a day.

The story said Molotov, who authored the infamous 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact with Nazi Germany that at first kept Russia out of the war, lives in a two-story house in a Moscow suburb.

Anti-Tank Weapon

Molotov’s name inspired the famed improvised anti-tank weapon, the Molotov cocktail--a bottle filled with gasoline and ignited with a wick.

Molotov, a close associate of Stalin from the 1920s until the dictator’s death in 1953, was Soviet foreign minister for 20 years, meeting Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill in the center stage of world diplomacy during the crucial years before and after World War II.

Molotov lost out in a power struggle with Nikita Khrushchev after Stalin’s death in 1953 and was dispatched to Mongolia as ambassador.

In 1962 he was stripped of his membership in the Communist Party as part of a de-Stalinization campaign under Khrushchev. That membership was quietly restored two years ago, with the first word of it leaking out only four months after the action.