Vyacheslav Molotov in the context of "Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union"

The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, officially the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and also known as the Hitler–Stalin Pact, the Berlin–Moscow Pact and the Nazi–Soviet Pact, was a non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, with a secret protocol establishing Soviet and German spheres of influence across Eastern Europe. The pact was signed in Moscow on 24 August 1939 (backdated 23 August 1939) by Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov and German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop.

Tripartite discussions between the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and France had broken down after the Soviet Union was excluded from the Munich Agreement in September 1938. Joseph Stalin, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, had indicated that the USSR was willing to support Czechoslovakia militarily if France did so as well. Subsequently, rapprochement between Soviet Union and Nazi Germany began in early 1939. Later that year the Soviet-German pact was agreed, committing both sides to neither aid nor ally itself with an enemy of the other for the following 10 years. Under the Secret Additional Protocol of 23 August 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union agreed to partition Poland; Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Bessarabia were allotted to the Soviet sphere, while Lithuania – apart from the Vilnius region, whose "interests" were recognized – lay in the German sphere (Lithuania – including the Vilnius region, but excluding a strip of land – was only transferred to the Soviet sphere by the 28 September 1939 Boundary and Friendship Treaty). In the west, rumored existence of the Secret Protocol was proven only when it was made public during the Nuremberg trials.

Joseph Stalin, second leader of the Soviet Union, died on 5 March 1953 at his Kuntsevo Dacha after suffering a stroke, at age 74. He was given a state funeral in Moscow on 9 March, with four days of national mourning declared. On the day of the funeral, of the hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens visiting the capital to pay their respects, at least 109 were later acknowledged to have died in a crowd crush.

Stalin's body was embalmed and interred in Lenin's Mausoleum until 1961, when it was moved to the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. The members of Stalin's inner circle in charge of organizing his funeral were Nikita Khrushchev, then-head of the Moscow branch of the Communist Party; Lavrentiy Beria, head of the NKVD; Georgy Malenkov, the chairman of the Presidium; and Vyacheslav Molotov, previously the Soviet Union's Minister of Foreign Affairs.

The German–Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty was a second supplementary protocol of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 23 August 1939. It was a secret clause as amended on 28 September 1939 by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union after their joint invasion and occupation of sovereign Poland. It was signed by Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov, the foreign ministers of Germany and the Soviet Union respectively, in the presence of Joseph Stalin. Only a small portion of the protocol, which superseded the first treaty, was publicly announced, while the spheres of influence of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union remained secret. The third secret protocol of the Pact was signed on 10 January 1941 by Friedrich Werner von Schulenburg and Molotov, in which Germany renounced its claims on a part of Lithuania, west of the Šešupė river. Only a few months after this, Germany started its invasion of the Soviet Union.

The Moscow Peace Treaty was signed by Finland and the Soviet Union on 12 March 1940, and the ratifications were exchanged on 21 March. It marked the end of the 105-day Winter War, upon which Finland ceded border areas to the Soviet Union. The treaty was signed by Vyacheslav Molotov, Andrei Zhdanov and Aleksandr Vasilevsky for the Soviet Union, and Risto Ryti, Juho Kusti Paasikivi, Rudolf Walden and Väinö Voionmaa for Finland. The terms of the treaty were not reversed after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The Karelian question refers to the debate within Finland over the possible reacquisition of this ceded territory.

Andrey Yanuaryevich Vyshinsky (Russian: Андре́й Януа́рьевич Выши́нский; Polish: Andrzej Wyszyński) (10 December [O.S. 28 November] 1883 – 22 November 1954) was a Soviet politician, jurist and diplomat.

He is best known as a state prosecutor of Joseph Stalin's Moscow Trials and in the Nuremberg trials. He was the Soviet Foreign Minister from 1949 to 1953, after having served as Deputy Foreign Minister under Vyacheslav Molotov since 1940. He also headed the Institute of State and Law in the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union.

The Potsdam Conference (German: Potsdamer Konferenz) was held at Potsdam in the Soviet occupation zone from 17 July to 2 August 1945, to allow the three leading Allies to plan the postwar peace, while avoiding the mistakes of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. The participants were the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States. They were represented respectively by General Secretary Joseph Stalin, prime ministers Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee, and President Harry S. Truman. They gathered to decide how to administer Germany, which had agreed to an unconditional surrender nine weeks earlier. The goals of the conference also included establishing the postwar order, solving issues on the peace treaty, and countering the effects of the war.

The foreign ministers and aides played key roles: Vyacheslav Molotov, Anthony Eden and Ernest Bevin, and James F. Byrnes. From 17 July to 25 July, nine meetings were held, when the Conference was interrupted for two days, as the results of the British general election were announced. By 28 July, Attlee had defeated Churchill and replaced him as Britain's representative, with Britain's new Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Ernest Bevin, replacing Anthony Eden. Four days of further discussion followed. During the conference, there were meetings of the three heads of government with their foreign secretaries, as well as meetings of only the foreign secretaries. Committees that were appointed by the latter for precursory consideration of questions before the conference also met daily. During the Conference, Truman was secretly informed that the Trinity test of the first atomic bomb on 16 July had been successful. He hinted to Stalin that the U.S. was about to use a new kind of weapon against the Japanese. Though this was the first time the Soviets had been officially given information about the atomic bomb, Stalin was already aware of the bomb project, having learned about it through espionage long before.

The deportation of Koreans in the Soviet Union (Russian: Депортация корейцев в СССР; Korean: 고려인의 강제 이주) was the forced transfer of nearly 172,000 Koryo-saram (also called "Koryoin" or "Soviet Koreans") from the Russian Far East to unpopulated areas of the Kazakh SSR and the Uzbek SSR in 1937 by the NKVD on the orders of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the Soviet Union Vyacheslav Molotov. One hundred twenty-four trains were used to resettle them 6,400 kilometres (4,000 mi) to Central Asia. The reason was to stem "the infiltration of Japanese espionage into the Far Eastern Krai", as Koreans were at the time subjects of the Empire of Japan, which was the Soviet Union's rival. However, some historians regard it as part of Stalin's policy of "frontier cleansing". Estimates based on population statistics suggest that between 16,500 and 50,000 deported Koreans died from starvation, exposure, and difficulties adapting to their new environment in exile.

After Nikita Khrushchev became the new Soviet Premier in 1953 and undertook a process of de-Stalinization, he condemned Stalin's ethnic deportations, but did not mention Soviet Koreans among these exiled nationalities. The exiled Koreans remained living in Central Asia, integrating into the Kazakh and Uzbek society, but the new generations gradually lost their culture and language. This marked the precedent of the first Soviet ethnic deportation of an entire nationality, which was later repeated during the population transfer in the Soviet Union during and after World War II when millions of people belonging to other ethnic groups were resettled. Modern historians and scholars view this deportation as an example of a racist policy in the USSR and ethnic cleansing, common of Stalinism, as well as a crime against humanity.

The Moscow Conference of Foreign Ministers, also known as the Interim Meeting of Foreign Ministers, was held in Moscow between the foreign ministers of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union from December 16 to 26, 1945. They discussed the problems of occupation, establishing peace, and other Far Eastern issues.

James F. Byrnes represented the United States, Ernest Bevin the United Kingdom, and Vyacheslav Molotov the Soviet Union. They issued a communiqué after the conference on December 27, 1945.