Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov (Вячесла́в Миха́йлович Мо́лотов, February 25, 1890 - November 8, 1986) was a Soviet politician and diplomat. Molotov and Stalin himself were the only senior revolutionary Bolsheviks to survive the Great Purges of the 1930s.

He was born in Kukarka, Russia, as Vyacheslav Scriabin (Скря́бин; he was a relative of the composer Alexander Scriabin). He joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1906 and took the pseudonym Molotov (from Russian: hammer). He was, along with Alexander Shlyapnikov, the senior Bolshevik in Petrograd at the time of the February Revolution as figures such as Lenin were still in exile. After what appears to be an odyssey through the landscape of geographic and political Russia including an important role in the October Revolution and editing the newspaper Pravda for a while, he started working under Joseph Stalin in 1922.

From December 19, 1930 to May 9, 1941, he was Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, in which role he acted as the formal head of state of the USSR. On the eve of World War II, he became People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs (Foreign Minister). After British-French-Soviet talks held in August of 1939 failed, he negotiated the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with his German counterpart, Joachim von Ribbentrop. It is believed that he was made foreign minister because his predecessor, Maxim Litvinov, was Jewish, and might thus have insulted the Germans by his role in negotiations. During the period prior to the outbreak of war between the USSR and Germany in 1941, he consistently annoyed the Germans with his pragmatic tenacity during negotiations, insisting on preserving or advancing Soviet interests in Eastern Europe, and not being deceived by idle German promises of concessions in other faraway parts of the world, such as India. (On one occasion, when Ribbentrop was discussing dividing up the spoils of a soon-to-be-conquered British Empire, Molotov responded by asking him why, if Britain was doomed, they were holding negotiations in an air raid shelter.) Later on, he also frustrated U.S President Franklin D. Roosevelt with his firm stance on issues during the war.

Hours after the German invasion on June 22, 1941, he gave a famous and heartening speech to the Soviet people, explaining the situation and emphasizing that the USSR had done nothing to provoke the war, but would fight on until victory now that it had begun.

He served as foreign minister until 1949 (when he was replaced by Andrei Vyshinsky), and then again from 1953 to 1956.

Following Stalin's death in 1953, Molotov found himself at odds with the reformist policies of Stalin's eventual successor, Nikita Khrushchev, and was strongly opposed to Khrushchev's 1956 denunciation of Stalin. In 1957, along with other top Stalinists such as Lazar Kaganovich, he attempted a coup within the party to oust Khrushchev. When this failed, it provided Khrushchev with a pretext to demote Molotov to a series of increasingly irrelevant posts: first as Ambassador to Mongolia (1957 - 1960) and then as the permanent Soviet delegate to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna (1960 - 1961). By 1964, he had been expelled from the party altogether.

Molotov was allowed to rejoin the party in 1984, but this was a purely symbolic gesture. By the time of his death (at the age of 96) in Moscow on November 8, 1986, he was the last surviving major participant in the events of 1917.