There were documents of recent history. The End of Russian Tsarism: Memoirs of a Former Commander of the Gendarme Corps (Petrograd, 1923), dense with pencil markings, had almost entirely deteriorated, but in the fold between pages 162 and 163 lay another single hair. Molotov also possessed two volumes of the fond and utterly mundane correspondence, conducted in English, of the last Tsar and his wife Alexandra from 1914 to 1917, as well as Monarchy before the Fall, 1914–1917: The Papers of Nicholas II, and the letters exchanged between Tsar Nicholas II and his cousin Kaiser Wilhelm (who addressed the Tsar as ‘Dearest Nicky’) between 1894 and 1914. There was a report on the First International Communist Women’s Conference of 1921 (all pages cut), a personal memento perhaps of the event that brought Polina Zhemchuzhina to Moscow from the south, with an introduction by the free-love advocate Alexandra Kollontai (who once described Molotov as the ‘embodiment of greyness and servility’).
With a soft pencil, Molotov had restored the titles on a set of proceedings of the Xth Party Congress of 1921, its fragility a testimony in itself to the need for the Party to restore the market economy by introducing NEP. The majority of the men whose names appeared on the covers of the books were killed in the 1930s: Trotsky, Bukharin, Preobrazhensky, Serebryakov, Sokolnikov, Georgy Pyatakov, Mikhail Tomsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Kamenev, Yan Rudzutak. Rudzutak, the Latvian Party member who had once been Molotov’s deputy, was the highest member of the Party (and a candidate member of the Politburo) to be arrested when he was taken to the Lubyanka in 1937. It marked a new stage of the Great Terror; now no one was safe. Rudzutak had been a close associate of Molotov’s, his assistant in the Council of People’s Commissars and an ally in the struggle against the ‘Trotskyites’. He had written the introduction to the 1927 one-volume edition of the discussions of the Xth Party Congress that I held in my hands, saying that the reason for reopening the debate was to show the inadequacy of Trotsky’s theoretical positions and his political differences with Lenin. Molotov was coolly intrigued by the courage Rudzutak showed under torture, by the fact that he never confessed. Hitherto, he had been known for his laziness. ‘I personally knew him well,’ he remembered, ‘a very nice fellow … by the end of his life, however, I got the impression that he was too interested in feathering his own nest …’ Echoing Trotsky’s appeals to Bolshevik virtue, Molotov says that Rudzutak was ‘no longer waging the struggle as a true revolutionary’, that he was too mixed up with women. He remembered visiting the Lubyanka with some other Politburo members and hearing Rudzutak’s allegations of torture: ‘he seems to have been cruelly tortured’, Molotov remarked, ‘but one must not act just on personal impressions’.
There were inscriptions to Molotov in the front pages of many of the books: ‘to dear Comrade Molotov’; ‘to dear Vyacheslav Molotov’; ‘to much respected Comrade Molotov’; ‘to Vyacheslav Mikhailovich, with all my heart … ’; ‘To the closest colleague of the Great Stalin, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov, as a sign of sincere love and deep respect from the author, F. Konstantinov’; ‘To Dear Vyacheslav, to the most brilliant comrade-in-arms of dear Ilyich from a grateful disciple – your brother, Victor German’; ‘to the Great Molotov with expressions of hope and Party credentials, A. K. Azizyan (CP member since 1917)’. Azizyan’s book was sent with a letter, signed ‘with communist wishes’, dated December 1927, the month in which Molotov delivered a report on the collectivisation of agriculture at the XVth Party Congress. Azizyan, who describes himself as a ‘mouthpiece for the farmer’ at the Congress, makes some anxious corrections of minor slips, and worries about whether the copies of his book have arrived in Moscow in time to be of use. There were a number of books on farming and the peasantry dating from the late 1920s, when fierce debates in the Party about the pace of the collectivisation of agriculture were underway. One of these, A. Bolshakov’s The Countryside: 1917–1927, with a preface by the Bolshevik Mikhail Kalinin and an introduction by the great orientalist S. F. Oldenburg (whose name I knew well from past research on quite unrelated themes), had a slip of foolscap tucked inside the cover bearing the words, ‘Respected Comrade Molotov! Knowing your deep interest in questions relating to the contemporary countryside, I beg you to accept my book, with comradely greetings, A. Bolshakov, April 1927, Moscow, 1st House of the Soviets, Room 402’.
‘I myself come from a village, but I didn’t know rural life well,’ Molotov said much later of that time of lethal struggle in the Soviet countryside. After the XVth Party Congress, Molotov was sent to visit villages in the Ukraine. He spent the nights on a special train, guarded by the OGPU. ‘I applied the utmost pressure to extort grain,’ he remembered, ‘all kinds of rather harsh methods.’ In the campaign of forced collectivisation and the ‘liquidation of the kulaks [richer peasants]’ which led to many millions of deportations and deaths, Molotov played as zealous a role as anyone in the upper reaches of the Party. A book in his library published in 1928, entitled The Collective Farm Movement: its Past, Present Tasks and Significance, had been inscribed by its author in red ink in a very shaky hand, ‘Vyacheslav Mikhailovich! I will be very grateful if you will read this … and set down your opinion of it. A. Mitrofanov, 17/vi/28’. Eighty out of its 132 pages have been cut. In the summer of 1928, Moisei Frumkin, Deputy Commissar for Finance, wrote a letter of protest to the Politburo, in which he attacked Molotov’s extreme hostility towards the kulaks. (Another Jewish Bolshevik from the Russian south, Frumkin had moved into apartment 73 in this house in 1922. He liked to amuse Lenin with politically apposite Jewish jokes.) ‘The countryside, with the exception of a small section of the poor peasants, is against us,’ Frumkin warned the Central Committee. ‘I do recall a man by the name of Frumkin,’ Molotov told Chuev more than four decades later, ‘a very straightforward man. I knew him well. A man of integrity who confronted the Central Committee openly … ’ ‘What became of him?’ Chuev asked. ‘He too got mixed up with right-wingers, I think,’ Molotov replied, suddenly vague on details. (Frumkin was arrested in October 1937 and shot in 1938.) Another work in Molotov’s collection, personally dedicated by Azizyan (only nine of its 204 pages have been cut), on Rent Relations in the Soviet Countryside, had been edited by Yakov Yakovlev, then chairman of the All-Union Collective Farm Council, who accompanied Molotov to Tambov in January 1928 to urge more extreme grain requisitioning and more merciless repression of kulaks. When Molotov was appointed head of the Council of People’s Commissars in 1930, the ardent collectiviser Yakovlev was his Commissar of Agriculture. By the end of the decade Yakovlev had been implicated in the elaborately fabricated case against Bukharin. He was shot in March 1939.