Molotov Dies; Key Stalin Aide : Ex-Foreign Minister, 96, Symbolized Cold War

Vyacheslav M. Molotov, the stern Old Bolshevik in the pince-nez spectacles who negotiated the 1939 German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact that cleared the way for Hitler’s invasion of Poland and the start of World War II, has died at the age of 96, the Tass news agency reported Monday.

Tass offered no details on the death of Josef Stalin’s loyal lieutenant who came to symbolize Soviet intransigence during the Cold War. It said only that Molotov died Saturday after “a long and grave illness.”

Molotov started his long career as a teen-age revolutionary in Czarist Russia and came to hold top positions in the Soviet hierarchy only to fall into disgrace after he lost out in a power struggle in the post-Stalin era. He was later rehabilitated and readmitted to the Communist Party, which had expelled him, and he spent his last years in comfortable obscurity in a Moscow suburb.

“I am happy in my old age,” Molotov was quoted as saying in a rare interview published in a Moscow newspaper last July. He said he spent his declining years haunting bookshops. “I have a large library at home,” Molotov was quoted in what is believed to be his last public remarks. “I never miss a chance to buy a book. I can afford that as I have a large pension.”

He was a member of the ruling Politburo for more than three decades until he was stripped of his party and government posts by 1957 after clashes with Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev. He was among the so-called “anti-party group” of Stalinists that objected to Khrushchev’s reform program.

Molotov, who joined the Communist Party in 1906, at the age of 16, was expelled from its ranks in the early 1960s but was readmitted in the summer of 1984.

His icy personality was ideally suited to the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West. Winston Churchill, the wartime British prime minister, once said that Molotov had “a smile like the Siberian winter.”

Molotov will be remembered in part because of the “Molotov cocktail,” a firebomb made by pouring gasoline into bottles. But Molotov left his most significant mark on history in August, 1939, when he negotiated the agreement with German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop that is often blamed for triggering World War II.

Hitler Given a Free Hand

The so-called Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact, a treaty of friendship, assured Soviet neutrality and gave Adolf Hitler a free hand to attack Poland. It also led to the division of Polish territory between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, gave Moscow control of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and cleared the way for Soviet occupation of Bessarabia.

Less than two years later, in 1941, Hitler scrapped the treaty and attacked the Soviet Union. Ironically, it was Molotov who broke the news to the Soviet people and asked them to resist the German invader.

During a visit to Berlin after the signing of the nonaggression pact, Molotov offered a rare display of humor. While sitting in a bomb shelter during a British air raid--France and Britain had declared war on Germany after its invasion of Poland--Von Ribbentrop assured Molotov that “Britain is finished.”

“Then why are we in this shelter and whose bombs are those falling outside?” Molotov asked sarcastically.

Molotov became one of the five original members of the State Defense Committee, chaired by Stalin after the German invasion, and he concluded wartime alliances with the United States and Britain in 1942. He attended all the wartime conferences that brought Stalin together with Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was present at the Potsdam Conference with President Harry S. Truman.

Ever suspicious of the Kremlin’s wartime allies, Molotov, according to a biographer, kept a loaded revolver by his bedside when he stayed at Churchill’s country house. He brought his own food when he visited President Roosevelt at the White House.

Delegate to U.N. Conference

After the war Molotov was the top Soviet delegate to the San Francisco conference at which the United Nations was born. Later, he earned a reputation for uncompromising hostility toward the West and absolute loyalty to Stalinist policies.

He was skillful, tenacious and patient. Churchill said he combined “outstanding ability and cold ruthlessness . . . the modern conception of a robot.”

As foreign minister in the immediate postwar years, he carried out policies that led to the East-West political division of Europe and the Sovietization of the East European states. It was Molotov who announced the Soviet Bloc’s rejection of massive U.S. aid for war-devastated Europe as proposed in the Marshall Plan.

He stepped down as foreign minister in 1949, but as a sign of his high standing with Stalin, he presided over the Communist Party’s 19th Congress in 1952. After Stalin’s death, in March of the following year, Molotov was renamed foreign minister, and he remained on the Presidium, as the Politburo was then called.

But he became one of the chief opponents of Khrushchev over the condemnation of Stalin as a mass murderer in the purges of the 1930s. As a result, Molotov was deposed as foreign minister in 1956 and named to a minor government post.

‘Anti-Party Group’

A year later, he was kicked out of the Politburo--he had been its youngest-ever member when he became a full member in 1925--and lost his job for participation in the “anti-party group.” In a clear rebuke, he was sent as ambassador to the remote outpost of Ulan Bator, the capital of Mongolia.

Three years later, Molotov was transferred to Vienna as the permanent Soviet delegate to the International Atomic Energy Agency. He was recalled from this post in November, 1961, when the party’s 22nd Congress charged him with drawing up death lists for Stalin’s purges. He dropped out of sight a few months later in official disgrace. In April, 1964, he was expelled from the party.

Born Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Skriabin, on March 3, 1890, in the village of Kukarka, he was son of a shopkeeper and a nephew of the composer Alexander Skriabin. As a youth he took music lessons and his family was able to afford to send him to good schools.

But despite his middle-class background he joined a Marxist student group and took part in the abortive 1905 revolution. The next year, at the age of 16, he became a Communist. At 19, he was arrested for revolutionary activity with fellow students.

He used many aliases during the furtive days of his revolutionary activity but finally took and kept the name name Molotov, a variation of the Russian word hammer. He moved to St. Petersburg, now Leningrad, and became a full-time Bolshevik organizer, helping to found the party newspaper Pravda in 1912.

Sent to Siberia

He was arrested again and sent to Siberia, but escaped and returned to the city in time to take part in the 1917 revolution. By 1921, he was a candidate (non-voting) member of the Politburo as well as secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.

Khrushchev credited Molotov with being the backbone of the Bolshevik faction of the party in the pre-revolutionary years, but some of his contemporaries held other views. Leon Trotsky, for example, termed Molotov “mediocrity incarnate,” and even V. I. Lenin, founder of the Soviet state, described Molotov as “the best file clerk in Russia.”

Unlike Trotsky, who was murdered in 1940, apparently by a Stalinist agent while living in exile in Mexico, Molotov was a political survivor, remaining at the top of the Soviet hierarchy for nearly 40 years, through every twist and turn of the party line.

As a full member of the Politburo, Molotov became one of Stalin’s closest and most self-effacing collaborators. In 1930, as a reward, he was named chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, or prime minister, and he held that post for nearly a decade.

Married in 1922

In 1922, Molotov married a Ukrainian Jew, Polina Karpovskaya, who became an important party official and headed the Soviet perfume and cosmetics trust. According to Soviet sources, she fell from favor in the 1940s and was sent to a labor camp during a Stalinist purge.

As one of Stalin’s most loyal and unquestioning lieutenants, Molotov reportedly never raised the issue of his wife’s detention during his almost daily meetings with the Soviet dictator.

Molotov’s wife was released after Stalin’s death and died of cancer in 1970. No members of the party leadership attended her funeral.