Who was Molotov, and why did he give his name to the explosives used by the Ukrainians against the Russian invasion?

Some do not believe in war, others are afraid, but thousands of Ukrainian civilians have decided to join their army to defend the country from Russian invasion. Vladimir Putin On February 24th.

All indigenous peoples have responded to the call of the Kiev government, which has a military force and a significantly smaller population than Russia.

Some sought out so-called Molotov cocktails, home-made firecrackers made of combustible materials in a glass container.

Images of ordinary people dedicated to the expansion of these home-made bombs went around the world.

With these types of ammunition and other government-provided weapons, civilians have been able to control major Ukrainian cities such as Kiev or Kharkiv.

The Ministry of Defense also provided guidance on their social media on how to use them against Russian military vehicles.

The name of these “home-made bombs” came from Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov, a former dignitary of the former USSR (USSR) who was the protagonist of another military conflict.

We tell his story here.

Who is Vyasaslav Mikhailovich Molotov?

Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov, a Russian national by birth and surname Skryabin, was twice foreign minister of the Soviet Union between 1939-1949 and 1953-1956.

Born to middle-class parents in 1890, he was part of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party from 1906, which later became the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

According to the Wilson Center in the United States, he collaborated with Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin in the 1917 revolution, which led to the fall of the Tsar and the Soviet Union to the Socialist Republic. Russia.

Later, he held various positions, such as secretary of the party’s central committee and chairman of the party committee in Moscow.

According to the Wilson Center, this last stage was achieved after participating in the so-called “refinement” of the Soviet Communist Party, a process of persecution against Stalin’s opponents.

Molotov-Ribbentrop Agreement

However, he is best known for signing the Non-Occupation Molodov-Ribbentrop Pact – as Foreign Commissioner – between Stalin’s Soviet Union and Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany in August 1939.

The agreement was, according to various sources, an agreement between the two powers dividing their interests to occupy Poland and the rest of Europe.

Fearing that it would provoke the Soviet Union, the Nazi government invaded Poland in September 1939, leading to World War II.

Meanwhile the Soviets invaded Finland in November of the same year, known as the Winter War.

It was during this conflict that the Molotov cocktail became famous.

Winter war and pipe bombs

A review of the book “A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish War of the Winter of 1939-1940” by historian William Trotter explains why Finnish soldiers named their homemade bombs “Molotov cocktails”.

On Soviet radio, diplomat Molotov said his country’s army had not dropped bombs on Finnish territory during the conflict, but had “distributed and fed.”

In his words, the soldiers mockingly began to call the Soviet bombs “Molotov picnic baskets”.

Later, they adopted the name for their own temporary bombs.

Although the article mentions the name of the Soviet Union’s intervention in Finland, it establishes that the origin of Molotov cocktails dates back many years, as there are records of the use of these devices, for example, in the Spanish Civil War of 1936- 39.

Now, Molotov cocktails are back in the news because of the opposition of the Ukrainian people to the Russian invasion.