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'Art and evil can go together'

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Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin's right hand man during the Soviet purges, was a butcher on a mass scale, but he held a secret passion for the written word and owned a huge library. Dr Rachel Polonsky, a Cambridge academic who lived in Moscow for a decade, chanced upon fragments of his library in a grand old mansion flat in central Moscow and has written a new book about the library.

Dr Polonsky and Robert Service, professor of Russian History at St Antony's College, Oxford, and biographer of Trotsky, reflect on Molotov's life.

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