COLD WAR: Old Reliable

If it is possible to win time, to get even a short respite for organizational work, we must obtain it.

—Lenin

Expert opinion in the West, hesitant at first to make any judgments at all on the goings-on in the Kremlin, last week was hardening into a conclusion: that the new Soviet peace offensive primarily reflects and responds to internal stress. The men in the Kremlin do not want anyone rocking the boat—either from inside or out—until the scuffle in the wheelhouse is over.

The man chosen to lull the rest of the world, to relax the external pressure in the cold war by seeming to give much and actually giving little, is an old and skilled hand at the game. He is Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov, Foreign Minister of Russia and Communism’s Old Reliable—who has been a member of the Politburo longer than anyone else (32 years).

The rest of the world’s diplomats heartily dislike and healthily respect Vyacheslav Molotov. Alone of the top men in the Kremlin, he is familiar with lands and peoples beyond the control of the Red army. He alone has had to match the rigidities of Communist dogma with the realities of the undogmatic world outside. He has been the principal foreign agent of Communism since 1939. Most of the twists and somersaults of Soviet foreign policy have been his handiwork—in execution, and often in conception. But not necessarily in the basic decisions: Molotov is a born No. 2 man.

Aunty Molly. Once set in motion, however, robotlike Aunty Molly (as the British call Molotov) can be amazingly effective. An American, contrasting the high hopes aroused by the Russian peace offensive with the minimum so far conceded (an agreement to return 605 wounded U.N. prisoners), paid Molotov a grudging compliment: “They act gracious at parties, like other people.they’re sort of polite about shooting down some of our flyers, Vishinsky quits using billingsgate in his speeches at the U.N.—and a lot of people conclude that a fine new day has dawned.”

Last week Aunty Molly summoned a group of foreign emissaries to his white-walled ministry. For the first time in years, he chatted pleasantly—a task that is far from easy for a man whose infrequent smiles seem to make his face ache. When the new U.S. ambassador, Charles (“Chip”) Bohlen, arrived in Moscow to take up his post, Molotov sent his chief of protocol to the airport to shake his hand. The same day he talked for 49 minutes with the British ambassador, and asked after Foreign Secretary Eden’s gallbladder complaint. With such small gestures, and vague hints of bigger ones to come, did Vyacheslav Molotov peddle his latest bill of goods marked “Peace.”

Light Out. Of all the shadowy figures in the Kremlin, Molotov is the man the world knows most about. In person, he is a small, unprepossessing, pigeon-toed man with golden pince-nez and the hardpan face of a gravedigger. Looking into his eyes, wrote British Diplomat Harold Nicolson, “is like looking into a refrigerator when the lights have gone out.”

To Winston Churchill, Molotov was “a man of outstanding ability and coldblooded ruthlessness . . . His cannonball head, black mustache and comprehending eyes, his slab face, his verbal adroitness and imperturbable demeanor were appropriate manifestations of his qualities and skill. He was above all men fitted to be the agent and instrument of . . .an incalculable machine.”

Lenin once dismissed Molotov as “Russia’s best filing clerk.” A keener assessment appears in a snatch of dialogue from an early session of the comrades.

Trotsky to Molotov: “You are mediocrity incarnate.”

Molotov to Trotsky: “It is not given for everyone to be a genius. I only flatter myself that I have willpower and guts.”

At the round tables of diplomacy, Molotov operates like a human trip hamme-pounding friend and foe alike into silence or submission. He uses some effective ploys. Example:

¶ The ten-ton hint. To the Swedish ambassador in wartime Moscow, Molotov hinted: “I don’t think the Moscow climate agrees with you. I think you ought to ask your government to call you back for a rest—the sooner the better.” ¶ The question-mark barrage. After listening to Adolf Hitler grandiloquizing about “spheres of influence,” Molotov silenced him by asking all at once: “What’s this about a new order in Europe? And in Asia? What role is the U.S.S.R. going to play? What about Bulgaria? Rumania? Turkey? How shall Russian interests be preserved in the Balkans?” ¶ The dialectical pounce. At the Potsdam Conference, a concrete issue of fact arose between Molotov and Britain’s Anthony Eden. Politely, Eden began: “I may be mistaken, but . . .” Before he could finish the sentence, Molotov broke in: “You are mistaken,” and that was that.

Diplomat in Action. U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles is more impressed than most by Molotov’s expertness. In his book, War or Peace, Dulles describes how Molotov seized on the personal foibles of each of his opponents at the 1945 London Council of Foreign Ministers :

The U.S.’s JIMMY BYRNES “spoke freely and … off the cuff, but was not always legalistically precise. Molotov sought repeatedly to draw him out . . . ‘What precisely was it that he proposed?’ ‘Would he restate the case so as to clarify it?’ Molotov . . . hoped that by evoking statements and restatements that were extemporaneous, he might bring about a misstatement upon which he could seize.”

Britain’s ERNEST BEVIN “was bluff and hearty, easily angered and quickly repentant. Mr. Molotov treated him as a banderillero treats a bull, planting darts that would arouse him to an outburst . On one occasion, Bevin was provoked into saying that Mr. Molotov talked like Hitler . . . Molotov jumped to his feet and stalked to the door. Mr. Bevin, with contrition, hastened to explain away his heated words and, as a mark of his sincerity . . . [conceded] the point in dispute . . .”

France’s GEORGES BIDAULT was still smarting under his country’s exclusion from the Potsdam Conference. “Molotov’s objective,” says Dulles, “was to provoke him to leave the conference. To that end . . . Molotov tried to outrage French honor by petty slights. He would . . ask for a postponement . . . and not tell Mr. Bidault. Mr. Bidault, appearing punctually at the original hour, would sit with growing impatience as no colleagues appeared, or return to his hotel. On occasions, he was on the verge of returning to Paris.”

Dulles’ conclusion: “I have seen in action all the great international statesmen of this century … I have never seen such personal diplomatic skill at so high a degree of perfection as Mr. Molotov’s.” Other diplomats are not quite so laudatory: they admire Molotov’s patience and his relentless persistence, but they think he is too inflexible.

Boy with Soft Hands. Molotov was born Vyacheslav Skriabin, son of a Great Russian retail clerk who worked in a dry-goods store in the village of Kukarka (now Sovietsk). Papa Skriabin, though far from wealthy, owned a roomy frame house; his children went to high school and learned the violin, which Molotov is said to have played badly but with soul. Molotov has claimed the composer Skriabin as an uncle, but Skriabin’s family does not reciprocate.

To 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.

In 1902, the 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.”

For 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.

A Man Named Djugashvill. One of

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.

The 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.

In 1921 Lenin made Molotov Second Secretary of the Communist Party Secretariat. The first secretary: his old ally Joseph Stalin. In the Trotsky-Stalin feud Molotov stuck by Joe, helped him transform the dictatorship of the proletariat into the dictatorship of the secretariat. One by one, the Old Bolshevik revolutionaries went down before Stalin’s wrath: Trotsky the warlord, Zinoviev, chief of the Communist International, Bukharin, Lenin’s “closest disciple” and longtime editor of Pravda, Kamenev, ambassador to London and Rome, Tomsky, head of trade unions, Rykov, head of government. Their power went to Stalin, their jobs to his faithful few.

Walks in the Kremlin. The biggest plum of all went to Molotov. In 1930, at the age of 40, he became Premier. His acceptance speech: “I received my schooling under the direct guidance of … Comrade Stalin. I am proud of this. Until today, I had to work mainly as a party worker. I declare to you, comrades, that I am going to work in the government also as a party worker, as the agent of the party’s will.”

The 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, I on their faces,” she said.

To 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 in the sea when they ought to be on citizens’ tables.”

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.”

From Britain, Mr. Smith flew on to Washington, where he boarded for three nights at the White House as “Mr. Brown.” Six months later, at a Kremlin conference, Stalin told a visitor that the Foreign Minister of Russia had been gallivanting in Chicago, “where the other gangsters live.”

Baiting Aunty Molly was one of Stalin’s pet pastimes during World War II. To General de Gaulle, who went to Moscow to negotiate a Franco-Soviet treaty, Stalin wisecracked: “You are a hard bargainer. You got the better of Molotov. I think we shall have to shoot him.” Frenchman and Russian laughed until they noticed Molotov white with fear.

Molly’s Offensive. As Foreign Minister, Molotov has made his mistakes, some of them thumping big ones. He misread Tito, lost the airlift battle of Berlin, mis judged U.S. reaction to the invasion of South Korea. Above all, he and his “fellow Politburocrats allowed the nakedness of Communist aggression to alert the West to rearm. To undo that “error” is now the principal external target of Russia’s peace offensive.

The British Foreign Office believes that the Communist objectives are four:

1) The breakdown of NATO.

2) The neutralization of Germany.

3) The end of Nationalist China.

4) A break between the U.S. and her foreign allies.

Most of all, a period of cold peace—what Stalin called “an ebb in the revolutionary tide”—would give the new men in the Kremlin time to settle down.

Who Is No. 1 ? They seem to need it badly. A good many Western observers no longer accept as fact what once seemed so plain: the direct transference of authority from Stalin to Malenkov. That original assumption leaves too many later developments unexplained: e.g., the abandonment by Malenkov of the key job of Secretary of the Communist Party, and the conspicuous absence of any personal buildup of Malenkov.

One foreign ambassador in Moscow concluded a recent dispatch to his government with the cryptic sentence: “The story of Stalin’s death has not yet been written.” The Russian experts of two other nations (both of whom served tours of duty in Moscow) have pieced together estimates of the situation which agree remarkably well, though arrived at independently. Their interpretation: ¶ That Stalin last fall became worried by slackness in the Soviet leadership, which accounts for the fervent denunciation of nepotism, inefficiency and mismanagement at the null Party Congress in October.

¶ That in ordering the doctors’ purge in January, he intended a drastic shake-up in the higher echelons, with Lavrenty Beria (whose police were accused of laxity) marked out as one of the first victims. ¶ That Malenkov got wind of Stalin’s intentions, and—fearing that such a purge might involve himself sooner or later— made common cause with Beria. ¶ That something historic happened in the Kremlin the night of Feb. 15, two weeks before Stalin’s death. Fact: at the bottom of the back page of Izvestia Feb. 17 appears this laconic death notice: “The Office of the Commandant of the Kremlin regrets to announce the premature death February 15th of Major General Piotr Yevdokimovich Kosynkin and expresses its condolences to the bereaved family.” Kosynkin was one of the chiefs of Stalin’s bodyguards.

¶ That Stalin was then either murdered by Beria’s cops or—old and ailing—had his death hastened by emotional SHOCK which brought on his fatal stroke. ¶ That Beria—who saved his own life by plotting against his master’s—is thus the key man in the new regime. But it would be too obvious and jarring to the public for the policeman to assume full powers himself, especially after Malenkov, during the last Party Congress, had been made to appear “most likely to succeed.” “The Russians,” wrote a U.S. expert, “are purists of power. They pass up all the cheap little victories, like getting your picture in the paper, because it makes it easier to arrive at the ultimate goal of power.” ¶That Malenkov, therefore, was set forward as Premier. Ten days later, “at his own wish.” Malenkov gave over the vital party secretaryship, and its control of party cadres, to Old Bolshevik Nikita Khrushchev. In Stalin’s day, when men began growing too big, he handled them as Hercules did the giant Antaeus: he lifted them up and kept their feet off the ground, whereupon, having lost touch with their roots, they became weak enough to destroy. Beria, presumably, may be doing the same with Malenkov.

If this interpretation, or a substantial part of it, is correct, it helps explain why 1) the doctors’ purge was called off by Beria with such violent emphasis on false charges and “impermissible means” of extracting confessions; 2) why the glorification of Stalin’s name has abruptly declined in Russian papers; 3) why Russia is so anxious for a relaxing peace offensive. Old Fox. In the clash of bigger battalions fighting for naked power, cunning old Aunty Molly—though nominally one of the Big Three—is not one to get in the way. “You don’t seize power by mobilizing Foreign Office functionaries,” scoffs an Italian who knew him well.

British officialdom believes that Molotov will be the Lepidus to Malenkov’s Antony and Beria’s Octavian. “It’s as though he has been thrown across the gap between the old and the new regime, like a Bailey bridge. While Molotov’s got a use, they’ll use him. But once they’ve got their feet firmly planted on the other bank, the bridge will be discarded.”

The discarding process will not be easy, for Old Bolshevik Molotov, as George Kennan puts it, is “a smart old fox. He has extraordinary qualities of survival, or he wouldn’t have lived through the Stalin regime.” In Communist eyes, Molotov’s preservatives are great ability and slavish loyalty. At a time when internal Soviet necessity demands a double-headed policy of making war through peace, Vyacheslav Molotov is an extremely useful man.

*Her brother, Sam Carp, is a wealthy businessman in Bridgeport, Conn.