Word: molotovs
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...party's will was Stalin's, and in the eleven turbulent years that he served as Premier (1930-41), Molotov was Stalin's hammer. He forced through the first two Five-Year Plans. Not long after Molotov's pretty, pigtailed daughter Svetlana had learned to talk, she innocently laid bare the secret of her father's success. "Mother works," she pouted. "Father doesn't work. He just walks in the Kremlin with Stalin...
Perfume & Frog Fat. Stalin rewarded the Hammer by showering his family with favors. Madame Paulina Molotov (her revolutionary name is Zhemchuzhina, meaning a pearl) is an olive-skinned Jewess, who looks a little like the Duchess of Windsor. She was born in the Ukraine, "the poorest of the poor," but as the Premier's wife,* was soon gaily commuting from a stylish glass-and-steel dacha on the Moscow River. When Stalin issued his famous Diktat-Let us be gay, Comrades-the Pearl was appointed boss of the Soviet Perfume and Cosmetics Trust. "My husband works on their souls...
...Russian newspaper readers, Madame Molotov's attempt to make soap from frog fat was a surefire joke. So was her 1936 visit (as Olga Karpovskaya) to New York and Washington, where she lunched with Eleanor Roosevelt and announced that Soviet men had gone back to using toilet water. The Pearl was soon promoted to the Ministry of Food Industry, Division of Fish. Years later, having thoroughly proved her incompetence, she was fired by a rising young party boss named Georgy Malenkov. "The crux of the matter," Stalin is said to have remarked, "is that too many fish are swimming...
Alias Mr. Brown. In May 1939, while still Premier, Molotov succeeded Maxim Litvinoff as Foreign Commissar. Three-and-a-half months later he shocked the world with the Nazi-Soviet pact. Both sides solemnly swore to "refrain from every aggressive action"; the effect was that the Reich was free to attack the democracies while Russia grabbed half of Poland and the Baltic Republics: Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia. Then Hitler invaded Russia. Talking before Allied diplomats, Stalin would speak to Molotov of "your treaty with Ribbentrop." Stalin startled Sir Stafford Cripps by offering to sack Molotov, if the British wished...
...Molotov's wartime role was to win friends for the Soviet Union. He did it well. As "Mr. Smith," he flew to London to sign a 20-year treaty of alliance that is still, theoretically, the basis of Anglo-Soviet relations. Winston Churchill put him up in his country home at Chequers, and wrote afterwards: "Molotov's room [was] thoroughly searched by his police officers . . . The mattresses were all prodded in case of infernal machines. At night a revolver was laid out beside his dressing gown and his dispatch case...