VYACHESLAV MIKHAILOVICH MOLOTOV, 1890-1986)Deputy Premier of the Soviet Union

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VYACHESLAV MIKHAILOVICH MOLOTOV, 1890-1986), Soviet Communist leader who was particularly prominent in international affairs. He was born in Kukarka, Vyatka province, Russia (Sovetsk, Kirov oblast, Russia), on March 9, 1890. His family name was Skryabin. He adopted the pseudonym Molotov early in his career as a revolutionary.
Molotov began his political activity as a student in Kazan during the Revolution of 1905 and joined the Bolsheviks in 1906. Three years later he was arrested and exiled to the north of Russia for a two-year term. In 1912 he joined Joseph STALIN in founding the party newspaper Pravda. Exiled to Siberia in 1915, he escaped a year later and helped to plan the 1917 revolution.
After the revolution, Molotov rose rapidly in party ranks. In 1921 he became secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist party. He supported Stalin in his bid for power after Lenin's death in 1924. He was rewarded in 1926 by being made a full member of the Politburo. He became chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, equivalent to premier, in 1930. (He held this post until 1941 when Stalin assumed the post, making Molotov deputy premier.) In 1939 he was appointed commissar of foreign affairs (foreign minister), and as such negotiated the nonaggression pact with Germany in August 1939. After the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 and the alliance of the Soviet Union with the Western democracies, he attended the Allied conferences at Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdam, and the San Francisco Conference, which organized the United Nations. He headed the Soviet delegation to the United Nations until 1949.