Molotov Remembers is the only book that allows the reader an inside look at Russia pre-1917, through the Bolshevik Revolution, and on through World War II and the Cold War. This is the first time a truly insider account has been written, and who better than Vyacheslav Molotov, the notorious Soviet foreign minister who preceded Stalin as premier. This book is not necessarily contradictory to the history we were taught in school, for never before have we had such an intimate account of the dealings inside the Soviet government.

What is also particularly fascinating is not the views Molotov held about the West but the views he held of Khrushchev and Brezhnev. The reader is introduced to what Molotov held as the true course for building socialism in the USSR, and one would be surprised to find out what he thought of Khrushchev and Brezhnev building "communism" in the Soviet Union.

All in all, this is an excellent buy.

V. M. Molotov was one of the most evil, ruthless human beings who ever lived, and if there's a Hell, he's in it. For forty years he helped make sure the Communist Party ruled the Soviet Union, whatever the price -- and that price came close to being his own life, and that of his wife.

In the eighties, Felix Chuev had a long series of interviews with Molotov, and they form a fascinating picture of life on the inside of the Soviet Empire. Molotov was a true believer in Communism right till the end, ready to justify anything if he thought it waould preserve the Party's power. He still loved Stalin, and said so, while admitting that he and his wife were nearly murdered by the paranoid old tyrant. 'It was necessary,' he says.

And in a weird way, he was right. Marx's grand vision was that capitalism would industrialize the world, but the workers would hate it and destroy it. Wrong! The workers were interested in better pay and better working conditions, not running the country. And Marx never had a plan for running the economy after the revolution -- somehow, the workers would solve all problems by unanimous agreement.

When the Bolsheviks seized power, they nearly destroyed Russia's economy. Facing collapse, Lenin re-instituted a form of capitalism (the New Economic Policy) to buy time to consolidate the Communist Party's rule. But by the late twenties, the NEP had done all it could. The CPUSA had to either give up power and go to full capitalism, give up growth and be conquered by Germany, or build industry on the bones of the masses. Stalin saw this, and chose to murder millions rather than admit that capitalism just works better. Molotov was his chief henchman in these policies, and he's dead right that without them, Soviet power couldn't have survived.

But even with them, it couldn't survive. The only way a Communist society can work is by one man rule and periodic bloodbaths. But in order to preserve that rule, the dictator has to slay all successors able and ruthless enough to take his place. So invariably, the Great Killer's successors are mediocrities, and the totalitarian system rots from within. It will happen in China before the 2020s are out, and in Cuba by the 2030s.

All students of Russia and the former Soviet Union (and I still LOVE to type 'former Soviet Union') should read this book and see what is necessary to hold the kind of power Lenin and Stalin did, to achieve what little they achieved, and why in the end it still had to fail.

This book gives us fascinating portraits of Lenin and Stalin, which refute all the vicious lies about them. It tells us much about international affairs, especially the Soviet Union's successful efforts to delay Hitler's treacherous attack in 1941, and on the period since Stalin's death in 1953. As he told Chuev, "I write about socialism - what it is and, as peasants say, 'what we need it for.'"

The book shows Stalin's great achievements: solving the nationalities question, industrialisation, the collectivisation of agriculture, the defeat of Hitler. Molotov points out that the Soviet Union created "industrialisation by our own means, by our own manpower. We could not rely on foreign loans." He sums up the successes of the 1920s and 1930s: "In essence we were largely ready for the war. The five-year plans, the industrial capacity we had created - that's what helped us to endure, otherwise we wouldn't have won out." As he said, "Many things have been done wonderfully, but that is not enough."

Molotov was "a fighter for communism, Lenin's longest surviving comrade-in-arms." He was born in 1890. In 1912 he helped to found Pravda. In 1917 he joined the executive committee of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies. In October 1917 he became a member of the Military Revolutionary Committee which prepared the armed uprising in Petrograd.

In 1926 he became a member of the Politburo, where he worked till 1952. From 1930, when he became Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, he helped to lead the drives for industrialisation and for collectivisation. He took a leading role in the fight to defeat the Fifth column. In May 1939 he was appointed Commissar for Foreign Affairs.

He was Deputy Chairman of the State Council of Defence throughout the Great Patriotic War (World War Two). In 1942 he signed the Anglo-Soviet Treaty of Alliance; he also secured Roosevelt and Churchill's agreement "To the urgent tasks of creating a second front in Europe in 1942." In 1943 he seconded Stalin at the Teheran Conference, and in 1945 he did the same at the Yalta and Potsdam Conferences. He represented the Soviet Union at the San Francisco Conference which founded the United Nations.

In 1957 the attempt to remove Krushchev was defeated and Molotov and the other Communists were expelled from the Central Committee. In 1962 he was expelled from the Party. In 1984 he was reinstated. He died in 1986.

Perhaps his epitaph should be what he said in 1976, "Properly speaking, what was Hitler's aggression? Wasn't it class struggle? It was. And the fact that atomic war may break out, isn't that class struggle? There is no alternative to class struggle. This is a very serious question. The be-all and end-all is not peaceful coexistence. After all, we have been holding on for some time, and under Stalin we held on to the point where the imperialists felt able to demand point-blank: either surrender such and such positions, or it means war. So far the imperialists haven't renounced that."