The Rubber Hammer

We remain prisoners of habits and patterns formed in the past [which'] now hinder the deployment of new, wider and more active forms of struggle . . . We must put a stop to this . . . The Leninist combination of adherence to principle and elasticity in the pursuance of the foreign-policy line is the factor which ensures the success of our party in the solution of international tasks.

The author of this pertinent criticism of past Soviet foreign policy at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party in Moscow last February was Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov himself. Last week Molotov was the victim of the method he advocated. Eight years ago he had signed the letters which summarily expelled Marshal Tito's Yugoslavia from the fraternity of 'Communist countries. "Elasticity" in the current foreign-policy line, now vociferously welcoming Tito back in Moscow, demanded that Molotov get out of his job of Foreign Minister.

Molotov's departure had been long foreseen; the surprise was in the timing. In a gesture worthy of Herod, Molotov's head was served on a platter as a welcome to Tito.

Molotov had long ago read the future. "Gentlemen, we are getting older," he told a group of diplomats at Vienna last year. "Don't you think it's time we gave way to younger men?" The man who stepped into the job of Soviet Foreign Minister was Dmitry Shepilov (see box), 16 years younger than Molotov, a newcomer to top party ranks.

Friend Koba. Even if bitter-memoried Tito had not made plain his dislike of Molotov, it was time for Old Stone Bottom to go. It was 50 years since he joined the Bolshevik party (as a boy of 16), and though he might now see the need for new methods, his name was too closely associated with that of Stalin to be the one to make them. His parents had been respectable people from the Volga region named Scriabin, related to the composer. Young Vyacheslav Mikhailovich ingratiated himself with the Bolsheviks by persuading a wealthy young bourgeois friend to finance a clandestine newspaper called Pravda. To this, and the fact that one of the first editors of Pravda was a young Georgian bandit named Djugashvili, alias Koba, alias Stalin, he owed his future. His own underground alias was derived from molot, meaning hammer. But though he was as methodical and repetitive as a foundry trip hammer, the stuff of his soul was not steel, but the durable latex of a heavy-handed rubber stamp. "The best filing, clerk in Russia," Lenin had said. "You are mediocrity incarnate," shouted Trotsky.

He made the Central Committee at 31, and the Politburo five years later, but the world knew little of him until 1939, when he succeeded Maxim Litvinov as Foreign Minister. Joking with General Charles de Gaulle years later, Stalin said: "You got the better of Molotov. I think we'll have to shoot him." De Gaulle records that Molotov turned green. By containing his moments of terror and allowing himself to be Stalin's whipping boy, Molotov not only lived, but achieved fame. Stalin named factories, cities, ports after him. And in Western dictionaries he will doubt less be remembered for the "Molotov cocktail," the cheap Soviet gasoline bomb.

The Imperturbable. At the San Francisco, Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam conferences, Molotov's cold negotiating skill won the grudging applause of his adversaries. Wrote Sir Winston Churchill: "A man of outstanding ability and coldblooded ruthlessness . . . His cannonball head, black moustache and his slab face, his verbal adroitness and imperturbable demeanour were appropriate manifestations of his qualities and skill. He was above all men fitted to be the agent and instrument of ... an incalculable ma chine . . ." Said U.S. Secretary of State Dulles: "I have never seen such personal diplomatic skill at so high a degree of perfection as Mr. Molotov's."

Yet for all these tributes, Molotov seems to have resisted and to have under estimated the possibilities of the new-style Soviet diplomacy. He was out of place at Geneva, 1955, and he was left at home when B. & K. went to Belgrade, India and Britain. His style did not suit the new elasticity, which prefers a benevolent mask. But Molotov still remains First Deputy Premier, and he jovially turned up at social functions at week's end to prove that it is now possible to be demoted and live. It was a demonstration that he was only too happy to make.

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