LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Molotov: Foreign Minister
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Molotov was succeeded as foreign minister by Andrei Y. Vyshinsky in 1949, but he retained the post of deputy premier under Stalin. After the latter's death in 1953, he became foreign minister once more. He represented the USSR at the major international conferences in the next two years.
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Molotov took the name hammer just as Stalin had taken the name steel, and Stalin did indeed use Molotov to smash his opposition into submission and to pound his own power base into shape. On Stalin's behalf Molotov led the liquidation of the Mensheviks and then, with Voloshilov, went to Leningrad in 1926 to crush the Zinoviev opposition. In 1931 he was promoted to take the place of the deposed "rightest" Rykov as nominal Prime Minister (Chairman of the council of people's Commissars). in 1939 he surrendered the premiership to Stalin and become foreign minister when Maxim Litvinov's policy of collective security was abandoned in favour of Stalin's preparations to make a deal with Hitler. Molotov's first major act as foreign minister was to sign a nonaggression and friendship pact with the Nazi opposite number, Joachim von Ribbentrop.
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When Bukharin's ally, Alexei Rykov, was removed as Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (the equivalent of a prime minister) in December 1930, Molotov succeeded him. In this post, he oversaw the Stalin regime's greatest social revolution, the collectivisation of agriculture. Molotov carried out Stalin's line of using maximum force to crush peasant resistance to collectivisation, including the deportation of millions of kulaks (peasants with property) to labor camps. Many of the deportees died. He signed the "Law of Spikelets" and personally led the Extraordinary Commission for Grain Delivery in Ukraine, which seized a reported 4.2 million tonnes of grain from the peasants, leading to a widespread famine (known in Ukraine as Holodomor). Contemporary historians estimate that between four and six million Ukrainians died, either of starvation or in labor camps, in the move to collectivise farms.
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Molotov's views as a foreign minister can be seen in some anthologies of his speeches, for example, Problems of Foreign Policy (trans. 1949). Molotov was sufficiently bland to defy biographers, but there is Bernard Bromage, Molotov: The Story of an Era (1956). Most studies of Stalin devote some attention to Molotov, notably Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography (1949; rev. ed. 1966).
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In 1949 Molotov lost his post when Joseph Stalin appointed Andrei Vyshinsky as his Foreign Minister. After the death of Stalin in 1953 Vyshinsky was sacked and Molotov returned to his old job.
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Despite the great human cost, the Soviet Union under Molotov's prime ministership made great strides in industrial technology (See command economy). The rise of Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany gave the development of a modern armaments industry great urgency, and Molotov and the commissar of industry, Lazar Kaganovich, were primarily responsible for guiding this success. Ultimately, it was this arms industry which enabled the Soviet Union to prevail in World War II. However, the purges of the Red Army leadership, in which Molotov participated, gravely weakened the Soviet Union's defence capacity and led directly to the military disasters of 1941 and 1942. It ... led to the destruction of the peasantry, and its replacement by collectivised agriculture left a legacy of chronic agricultural under-production which the Soviet regime never fully overcame.
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