The orthodox view of Vyacheslav Molotov is that he was no more than Stalin's faithful servant; a dogmatic conservative communist of little or no imagination. Molotov was, indeed, Stalin's right-hand man while from the 1920s the two men presided over...

As the Russian invasion of Georgia in August 2008 demonstrated in no uncertain terms, Russia has developed into a neo-imperialist power seeking to restore its spheres of dominance, to undermine the emergence of a wider Europe, and to prevent the deve...