Molotov Remembers Conversations with Felix Chuev, Edited by Albert Resis, is Reviewed.

For much of the time between 1930 and 1952, Vyacheslav Molotov, a laconic, unsmiling man called Mr Nyet behind his back by western diplomats, was second only to Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union. He played a decisive role in the famine of 1932, during which millions of peasants died of starvation and disease. He was instrumental in liquidating the kulaks (the land-owning farmers). He was Stalin's faithful henchman during the Great Terror, in 1936-38, when both the …

…name will rise again and duly win a glorious place in history. In 1991 Terra, a leading Moscow publisher, printed 300,000 copies of an earlier version of this book. In his introduction, Mr Resis suggests that its publication was "intended to rally neo-Stalinists and other hard-liners in a movement to oust Gorbachev and establish a quasi-Stalinist regime." The results of Russia's elections presumably came as less of a surprise to the publishers than to many western commentators.