‘The soul of the collector is intelligible only by having regard to his conception of Time,’ Spengler wrote. Molotov revealed the true collector’s woe, long after the fact, at the loss of part of his collection, even, or perhaps especially, when the cause of that loss had been his own generosity. Remembering how the bourgeois city of Moscow had resisted the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, how extremely slowly the ‘uprising’ had proceeded, Molotov’s mind turned to a man called Alexander Arosev, ‘a very close friend of mine’. Molotov had met Arosev (a member of the recently founded Socialist Revolutionary Party) in 1905 in Kazan, where his parents had sent him from his native north to attend a technical school, a realschule. Molotov (then still called Skryabin) had just begun to take an interest in radical politics after the Russian defeat in the Russo-Japanese War and the strikes and insurrections of 1905. He and Arosev shared a sentence of exile in the Vologda region from 1909 to 1911. Arosev ‘became an author’, Molotov remembered. They remained friends until the late 1930s, spending leisure time together with their families. Just before his arrest in the summer of 1937, Arosev telephoned Molotov. Hearing his voice on the line, Molotov twice put down the receiver. Arosev called a third time, and told Molotov he could hear him breathing. After several more calls, Molotov uttered just two words, communicating to Arosev that he would help his children. ‘I kept some of his books with his autograph,’ Molotov mused. ‘Some time ago at a jubilee party in his honour, I was foolish enough to give all these books to his eldest daughter …’ It appears that it was not so much the loss of his ‘very close friend’ to the purges, but the loss of part of his own book collection, after Arosev’s rehabilitation in 1955, to a ‘foolish’ emotional impulse that Molotov continued to regret.
‘We will kill every enemy,’ Stalin had promised in a toast in November 1937; ‘if he is an Old Bolshevik, we will destroy his relatives, his family. We will destroy anyone who with his deeds or thoughts strikes a blow against the unity of the Soviet state.’ Of the small group of men who signed almost four hundred execution lists during the Great Terror, which lasted, at its peak, from the summer of 1937 with Politburo Order no. 00447 against ‘anti-Soviet elements’ until the early winter of 1938, Molotov signed the greatest number: 373 (eleven more lists than Stalin himself signed), bearing the names of 43,569 people. On one day in December 1937, Molotov, Stalin and Andrei Zhdanov signed away 2,274 lives. It was Molotov who had suggested sentencing by list. On some lists, he personally changed verdicts from imprisonment to death, but he made a habit of underlining numbers, not names.
Whenever Molotov spoke about the purges of his comrades in the Party in later life, he revealed an indifference to facts quite out of keeping with his punctilio when it came to numbering and renumbering the library catalogue that I was putting together in fragments on the floor of his apartment. ‘I’m not interested in who said what and where, who spat on whom …’ he retorted when asked why he did not write a memoir. ‘Was he repressed …?’ he replied when asked about another Bolshevik he had once known well. ‘I don’t remember. Who cares? … You can’t remember everything.’ Stalin’s men cultivated this kind of rejection of memory, of the concrete reality of the past.
David Ryazanov, many of whose publications of the 1920s were in Molotov’s collection, was exiled to Saratov, he did not know when: ‘he was knowledgeable and well-read. But, as Lenin used to say about him, “This man is a topsy-turvy library.” Everything was mixed up in his head, everything was a muddle … What use could he be?’ Someone must have told Molotov how Ryazanov (who had looked with such scorn on Stalin’s clumsy attempts to use the language of Marxist theory) had turned to bitter mockery at the end of his life. ‘I would like to see how socialism is going to be built in a single town, in a single apartment,’ Ryazanov would say. ‘What use could he be?’ Ryazanov was arrested in 1937, and shot in 1938.
Elsewhere Molotov reveals the obsessional book collector’s indifference to the ownership rights of others, casually admitting that he secured permission to remove from the Lenin Library a large collection of thin booklets, works by Marshal Tukhachevsky, many of which he then kept. Benjamin characterises the obsessive bibliophile of real stature as one for whom ‘the borrowing of a book with its attendant non-returning’ is the mode of acquisition most appropriate, and who will guard his treasures, turning a ‘deaf ear to all reminders from the everyday world of legality’. Molotov took out the books by Tukhachevsky because he disapproved of Khrushchev’s rehabilitation of the brilliant and charismatic General, who had been tried for Trotskyite conspiracy in proceedings led by Marshal Budyonny and summarily shot along with the elite of the Red Army in the summer of 1937. It was a tacit directive from Molotov – speaking of the need to root out ‘wreckers’ in the army – that had led to the arrest of Tukhachevsky and other senior officers. Like anyone else, Molotov found it very hard to keep track of all his purged comrades – so many stories to remember – but he did recall that Beloborodov had been tortured for many months for information about Tukhachevsky. The orders to torture came from the highest levels of the state; though he denied it to the end of his life, Molotov had counter-signed a decree approving torture in 1937. Nikolai Yezhov, head of the NKVD (as the secret police was renamed in 1934), had sent to Stalin the ‘unsatisfactory’ confession of Beloborodov, who had once been head of the Russian NKVD, and Stalin ordered torture to get a ‘real confession’ out of him. ‘There is a story that he was dragged down a prison corridor, screaming, “I am Beloborodov. Pass the word to the Central Committee that I am being tortured.”’Three decades after all this, Molotov looked through Tukhachevsky’s writings, which he had not read before, for evidence of guilt, and because, as he remarked, ‘the works of a genius are always exciting to look through’. He was hoping to enjoy the books even as he hoped that the man who wrote them would stay firmly condemned as an ‘enemy of the people’. To his regret, he found ‘nothing revealing’ or even exciting, noting with a hint of cynical disdain that the ‘booklets’ were full of eulogies to Party leaders, the usual promises that the Germans would be smashed, and long italicised quotations from Stalin, Voroshilov and himself. For Molotov, the brilliant Tukhachevsky’s ‘conspiracy’ was no more than a possibility that had to be pre-empted with a bullet. ‘Tukhachevsky did not know where he was going,’ Molotov convinced himself. ‘It seems to me that he would have veered to the right … 1937 was necessary’.
A weary impatience with the unknowability of other people is sometimes a characteristic of the bibliophile, who loves with fervour publication dates and catalogue numbers, all the categories of exact knowledge that a book can be made to represent. Just such a weariness emerges when Molotov allows himself to speak of all the killing that history had seemed to demand of him and his comrades, the difficulty of maintaining the ‘harsh unquestioning discipline’ that dictatorship requires. ‘Who is to maintain it?’ he asked, expressing what appears to be rare and genuine bewilderment. ‘People do not always want it, down deep, oppose it … we do not have ready-made pure people, purged of all sins …’
Only one book in the remains of Molotov’s library, the text of his own speech to the Supreme Soviet after his diplomatic mission to London in the summer of 1942 on the ratification of the Anglo-Soviet agreement to ally against Hitler (catalogue number 11531), had been inscribed by Molotov himself, in fine hand, in faded blue ink: ‘To Polinochka, Your Vyacheslav’. From a man whose first vocation was to history, this must have been a particularly significant conjugal token.