Word: molotovs
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Proclaimed scarcely three months ago, the coroner's verdict on Vyacheslav Molotov seemed final. "A political corpse!" shouted the chief of the Soviet secret police to the cheering delegates of the 22nd Party Congress. The public autopsy accused Old Stonebottom. for ten years Stalin's Foreign Minister, of complicity in Stalin's bloody purges and of plotting with Chinese and Albanian Communists against Khrushchev's current line of "peaceful coexistence" with capitalism. Denounced as a "bandit" and an "enemy of the party," Molotov, 71, was summoned back to Moscow from Vienna, where for the past...
Summoned to the Soviet Foreign Office, Western correspondents were amazed to learn from an official spokesman that after eight weeks in Moscow, Molotov was returning to his job in Vienna and was already en route by train. In reply to questions, the spokesman said blandly that Molotov had not been expelled from the party, had come home for vacation, and had "never retired" from the atomic energy post. But next day, when the Moscow-Vienna express, an hour late, pulled into the Sudbahnhof, Molotov was not aboard. Back at the Soviet Foreign Office in Moscow, the spokesman hastily explained that...
Assuming that Molotov was really retaining his post, Western experts had several possible explanations: - He has something on Khrushchev, possibly (as one Vienna newspaper reported) a stack of documents, safely deposited in the West, detailing Khrushchev's own complicity in Stalin's actions. >There is a strong Stalinist faction in the Kremlin that is protecting Molotov. >Khrushchev is merely being shrewd enough to show magnanimity toward an aging foe, while at the same time avoiding a potentially embarrassing debate over his own political past...
...unusual delay in Molotov's departure, Moscow insisted merely that the Foreign Office had got the date mixed up. But Western skeptics interpreted the snarl as the second round of a serious disagreement in the Kremlin over Molotov's future. That he has any future at all is still doubtful...
...Before his Vienna assignment, Molotov was Soviet Ambassador to Outer Mongolia from 1957 to 1960. In 1959 the Kremlin tried to make him ambassador to The Netherlands, Greece or Argentina, but all three governments refused to accept him because Molotov obviously did not enjoy the confidence of his own regime. While serving his Outer Mongolian exile, he suffered further ignominy: his name was dropped from the latest Soviet encyclopedia...