Molotov Remembers: A Review

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_{This is a a review of “Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics”, submitted to Amerikaner.org by Grant Norman. If you would like to submit your own content, please email amerikanercontributions@proton.me}

In our people’s current state, we are as fish swimming in a sea of liberalism. Like the fish does not know it is wet, it is exceedingly difficult for us to grasp the ideology which we have drank by growing up and living in this regime. Breaking out of this passive acceptance and beginning to examine the truths which we are told to take for granted generally awakens a hunger for perspectives which challenge this worldview. We desire to know that, despite what our rulers tell us, we do not have to live this way, that another world is possible.

The arguments against liberalism from the right are well-circulated in the dissident circle, more so now that the American Left has largely been subsumed in the ruling ideology of rapacious neoliberalism. Where Marxism once posed a challenge to the liberal democratic model, it has been neutered by a shift to the biological Leninism of anti-White grievance politics and sexual perversion. So-called socialists like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez merely grant a veneer of rebellion to some of the system’s ardent supporters.

Which brings us to Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics, a collection of interviews with Vyacheslav Molotov conducted between 1969 and 1986. Molotov was the foreign minister of the Soviet Union during the Second World War and served as Joseph Stalin’s righthand man. He was also an “Old Bolshevik”, one of the original Russian revolutionaries, and an acolyte and associate of Vladmir Lenin. His life stretched from the twilight of the Russian Empire and her czars to Mikhail Gorbachev’s tenure as the last leader of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Molotov was an apologist for the brutality inflicted by the Communist system and prided himself on his role in the vanquishing of Germany. What then does this unrepentant leftist, this figure who caused so much damage to our cause and to our people, have to teach us?

There is value in learning from Molotov because there is value in learning from the Bolsheviks and the system that they created. There are many things that we wish to avoid, things we could scarcely contemplate doing, but there is much to be learned as well from the group of revolutionaries who struggled and suffered in order to build a country which could overcome the Axis powers militarily and resist for decades the Anglo-American forces ideologically. Without celebrating Molotov, we can still learn from him and his experiences in revolution, government, and ideology.

Because it consists of excerpts from interviews rather than chapters, Molotov Remembers is organized by broad areas of focus rather than by a strict chronology. A rough timeline is possible through sections dedicated to Molotov’s time with Lenin, with Stalin, during the war, and following it, but these are subject to frequent tangents and asides which bring the conversation forward in time. Besides having its roots in verbal rather than written communication, Molotov Remembers also differs from many anti-liberal memoirs in either one of two key ways.

The lesser of the pair is that Molotov is not apologetic. Unlike the memoir of Albert Speer or German generals who served under Adolf Hitler, Molotov feels no need to issue denials or denunciations. Rather, he asserts that Stalin was a great leader and that the purges conducted in the 1930’s were necessary and good, even though Molotov’s own wife was one of the individuals caught up in their wake.

Remarkably to a western audience, Molotov’s interviewer does not challenge him too fiercely on this point. The conversation is between two illiberal thinkers, and it is an interesting one to witness for westerners used to monologues or interrogations by liberals. While the American editor of my edition of Molotov Remembers makes sure to lay out his loathing for the book’s subject in his introduction, his voice fades away in the face of Molotov’s sheer obstinance in refusing to condemn Stalin or Stalinism.

The second way that Molotov Remembers differs from other works of illiberal autobiography is that Molotov was on the winning side, at least initially. Instead of a contrite or bitter failed revolutionary, he could find strength in the fact that his side won, at least initially.

During his lifetime, Molotov was able to see the decay of the revolution and the state that he had fought for into the bureaucratic erosion of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev periods, and it is interesting to hear Molotov’s critiques of these leaders and their policies from the lens of an Old Bolshevik rather than a liberal or anti-Communist one. Would the National Socialist revolution had undergone a similar such hollowing out? It is impossible to know for certain, but the fate of Francoist Spain provides the modern right-wing case for winning the war but losing the peace.

Again, there are lessons to draw from the Bolshevik Revolution, even if its aims and outcome were reprehensible, and there are lessons to be drawn from the Soviet Union’s faltering as well. Along with the loss of trust and bureaucratization, Molotov also cites a loss of mission and faith in the Soviet Union as opening it up to liberalizing elements.

China certainly learned from the mistakes of the other Communist power, lessons which have allowed its party and its system to adapt and outlast its one-time rival. The education provided by Molotov Remembers is not a clear cut one, given its structure and its subject, but there is value to be parsed out from the experience of a revolutionary who experienced the spectrum of triumph and disillusionment while holding fast all the while to his principles.