stop! sledgehammer time
Or, the man that made even Stalin say "ugh, *this* guy."
Hi friends!
Today’s dirtbag is a reader request, which I was delighted to receive! The best days are days when I learn about a new-to-me dirtbag.
(This lovely reader also asked if she needed to pay for commissioning a dirtbag, to which I replied “God no, who do you think I am, Doris Kearns Goodwin? but if you want to send me something free and amazing please do,” to which she replied with this image of an owl in traditional Russian dress being stepped on by a bear wearing pants:
No further questions, Your Honor. I am content.)
Without any additional time-wasting or owl-sharing, may I introduce our dirtbag in question:
Vyacheslav Molotov, A Man Who Even Stalin Thought Was A Piece Of Shit
“Dirtbag” might not be a strong enough word to describe a guy who was posthumously charged with genocide. So let’s all align from the get-go that Molotov fucking sucks, and then come together in talking shit about him, as is proper.
As a first sign this guy would become a real piece of work, “Molotov” isn’t even his real name. He was born Vyacheslav Skryabin in 1890, and as the Russian Revolution got closer, he changed his name to “Molotov,” which translates to something like “Ol’ Sledgehammer.” Thought it sounded more…Bolshevik-y, I guess.
This has wild Genocidal Lady Gaga energy, and I want us to all pause and acknowledge it for a sec. It’s like if I knew I wanted to get hired someday as a copy editor and legally changed my government name to “Allison Fightin’ Em Dash.”
(Am I considering that now? A bit.)
IDK, My BFF Stalin
When Molotov turned 21, he moved to St Petersburg, where he joined the staff of Lenin’s Pravda newspaper and met a little shit named Joseph Stalin. This is how I imagine that meeting went:
Stalin: [enters room, takes off coat] Morning, all
Molotov: Hey! Holy shit! Stalin! Your genocide ideas are amazing! Big fan! Can we be best friends?
Stalin: *alarmed silence*
Molotov: I already changed my name to show how excited I am about killing people! What do you say? Besties?
Stalin: [hurriedly putting coat back on] absolutely the fuck not, never speak to me again
Anyway, even though they weren’t besties, Stalin and Molotov were both involved in a little thing that happened in 1917, namely: THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION.
We’ll gloss over that bit for now. Stuff happened, people got murdered, communism, &c. Go to a real historian if you want serious facts.
In the post-Romanov government, Molotov leaned into his favorite hobby of sucking up to Stalin. Apparently he wore down Genocidal Joe through sheer persistence, as Molotov used his growing relationship with Stalin to land a spot on Lenin’s Politburo and Central Committee. Basically, he wormed his way into the Bolshevik inner circle through stubbornness and an ability to be a smarmy little asshole.
Then, when Lenin died in 1924, Molotov latched onto Stalin like one of those creepy suckerfish that cling onto sharks, and by the end of the decade he was the second-most-powerful party man in the Soviet Union.
Chairman of the Assholeburo
I want to be clear that me shit-talking Molotov’s personality isn’t editorializing. Everyone fucking hated this guy. Here’s an incomplete list of things people called Molotov:
Lenin: “a shameful, stupid bureaucrat”
Stalin: “Iron-Ass”
Trotsky: “mediocrity personified”
Stalin’s bodyguard: “Does Stalin like him because he’s afraid of working closely with a human person?”
Lenin: “The best file clerk in Soviet Russia.”
Churchill: “Cannonball-head”
Stalin, when told Molotov wanted to speak to him: “Oh God, does it have to be right away?”
And that’s just the shit that got written down. The only redeeming factor about Stalin is his sick burns of Vyacheslav Molotov, and I’d pay money to know what he called him in private. (Don’t you dare take that quote out of context. I will not have people emailing my publisher like “did you know your author thinks Stalin is hilarious?” I can’t believe I have to say this shit. “Iron-Ass” is objectively funny. Fuck Stalin. Leave me be.)
One Shitty Thing After Another
Probably not surprisingly for Stalin’s right-hand man, Molotov was…not a good person. Here is a deeply incomplete list of the shitty things he did while in office.
Literal Genocide: Namely, the policy of farm collectivization that led to famine, slave labor, and the deaths of roughly 10 million Ukrainians, a fact it is impossible to make a joke about. A Ukrainian court posthumously charged him with genocide in 2010.
Friend-Murder: Unlike most other Soviet officials, Molotov made exactly zero percent effort to save a single person from the Great Purge, during which Stalin ordered the deaths of about 1 million people for being “anti-Soviet.” He ordered the execution of one of his close friends and to all appearances didn’t care all that much. Molotov was one of only two people of the original Lenin Politburo to survive the purges, a thing he managed mostly by being a coward and killing everybody else. Fuck this guy.
Hitler Handshake: (A thing decidedly less cool than the Hollywood Handshake, and which involves significantly less puff pastry.) Molotov was the one sent to Berlin to negotiate the German-Soviet pact of nonaggression during World War II. Literally nothing good has ever come from a person who shook hands with Hitler.
Being the Worst Husband Ever: In 1948, Stalin had Molotov’s wife, a Jewish woman named Polina Zhemchuzhina, arrested for treason, a word which here probably means “being Jewish.” Polina spent five years in a labor camp, and Molotov never said a word to Stalin to circumvent her arrest. This makes me so much madder than if he had just been a straight-out party-line antisemite, a fact I can’t explain and do not care to.
General Fucking Wimp-Ass Behavior: I’d hate Molotov less if he had like a single ounce of spine. But he worshipped Stalin and burst into tears when Stalin died in 1953, even though Stalin had been like a heartbeat away from ordering Molotov’s execution at the time. And then he latched onto the next big strong guy in power, Lavrentiy Beria, only to denounce Beria and condemn him to death later that year when the winds started changing. This fucker followed around whoever was biggest and strongest like the real-life version of this meme:
And it just makes me mad generally.
The list of shitty things is so long, and I’m only giving you the highlight reel. When I started researching Molotov I was like “hmm I’ve heard that name before,” but now he’s way up there on my list of Historical Figures I Would Like to Invite to Take a Long Walk Off a Short Pier.
Cocktail Hour
“But wait, Allison!” you say. “Was he or was he not the guy with the flaming bottles?”
He was indeed. When the Soviets invaded Finland in 1939, the Soviet air force dropped shit tons of bombs on the Finns. Molotov came on the radio to claim that no, they weren’t bombs, they were humanitarian aid packages! Food, in fact! Bless the benevolence of the USSR!
This is how Finland responded to that:
The Finns, being apparently a sarcastic people, started calling these bombs “Molotov bread baskets.” When they started throwing fire bombs at oncoming Soviet tanks, they called them “Molotov cocktails,” a really fucking dark joke about a drink to go with the food.
According to contemporary sources, Molotov didn’t think this was funny. Although like, if we’re looking for historical arbiters of comedy, Iron-Ass Molotov probably isn’t the guy I’d pick.
2 Fascist 2 Furious
When Nikita Khrushchev (a name that will forever make me picture Steve Buscemi) came into power in the mid-50s, he had a bright idea that went something like this:
“Maybe…maybe Stalin isn’t the best role model?”
So Khrushchev went about throwing away all the things in Moscow that reminded him of Stalin, and that included Molotov. By 1962, Molotov had been stripped of all his political positions, kicked out of the party, and briefly banished to Mongolia for what I assume were reasons.
Molotov lived out the remainder of his days in the Soviet Union. Because karma exists but is apparently not very precise, he had a total of seven heart attacks, but lived until 1986, when he died at the age of 96.
I respect that God or whatever kept sending heart attacks every five years until one of them finally took. Good riddance.
Book Corner
As I mentioned in the last newsletter, the paperback edition of A Tip for the Hangman will be on shelves near you on January 4, 2022! If you like spy adventures in Elizabethan England, Shakespeare’s dirtbag predecessor, or the idea of boosting my sales numbers so I can continue to write books, I warmly encourage you to preorder! Or pick one up at your local bookshop in the new year!
To celebrate the paperback, I’ll be in conversation with bookseller Annie Metcalf from the Magers & Quinn bookstore in Minneapolis, and I’d love you to join me! This virtual event is on Thursday, January 13, at 7pm Central, and registration is free. Hope to see some of you there!
Until then, I hope you all have a wonderful new year, and that any holidays you may be celebrating are safe and lovely. I’ll be back in January with more historical assholery!
See ya in 2022,
Allison