Word: molotov
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...this day his white-collar origins embarrass Molotov. Once, when he was fulminating about the rights of the toiling masses, Britain's Bevin. a dockhand turned diplomat, rocked him with the question: "What do you know about workers?" Bevin waved his big, work-callused hands in Molotov's reddening face, and demanded: "Show me yours!" The Communist Foreign Minister, whose hands are soft as a banker's, kept them out of sight...
...Skriabins sent their son to the Czarist high school in Kazan. Eventually he made his way to the Polytechnic Institute in far-off St. Petersburg (now Leningrad). Molotov studied Marx, and in a dark, musty cellar pledged his life and liberty to the Bolshevik party. He was 16 and "sentimental"- a "slight, fragile youth," as one of the comrades described him, "with wild hair and a small, pale face lighted with brilliant, myopic eyes burning under a bulging brow...
...three years as a student, Molotov boned up on the techniques of violence. He was soon a certified expert: organizer of the underground in St. Petersburg's high schools, and author of proclamations that clamored for class revolt. By the time he was 27, Papa Skriabin's boy had been jailed six times, exiled twice. His name was so well known to the Okhrana, the Czarist secret police, that he changed it to Akim Prostota, which means roughly "Simple Sam." But the comrades called, him Molotov-a derivative of molot, a hammer...
...Molotov's classmates, a wealthy liberal, put up 100,000 rubles to found a revolutionary journal to be called Pravda (Truth). Molotov was appointed secretary; his editor was a mustachioed Georgian, eleven years his senior, named Joseph Djugashvili (alias Stalin). The two pledged "eternal alliance," and Stalin took room and board with Vyacheslav's widowed aunt...
...first issue of Pravda came out in 1912. Molotov was soon arrested and exiled to Siberia. When the Revolution came in 1917, he was a hunted escapee, hiding in Petrograd with a faked passport. He cheered on the revolutionary masses when the Czarist government collapsed, organized the Petrograd Soviet...