of his
wife."

MONTEFIORE: That`s right.

LAMB: How were they liquidated?

MONTEFIORE: They weren`t liquidated; they were about to be liquidated. Molotov was Stalin`s
oldest comrade. He`s the second man in the regime in the public eye, anyway. Stalin had turned against
him. And Molotov`s wife, Paulina, was a Jewess. And she had met Golda Meir, when Golda Meir visited
Moscow in 1948. And she had re-established -- she was a Bolshevik, a tough woman, a hard Bolshevik
woman who believed in all this killing, who believed in the whole regime, the whole of Stalin`s...

LAMB: Paulina.

MONTEFIORE: Paulina.

LAMB: And by the way, Golda Meir used to run Israel...

MONTEFIORE: That`s right, she was prime minister of Israel.

LAMB: ... from Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

MONTEFIORE: That`s right.

LAMB: OK.

MONTEFIORE: Golda Meyerson from Milwaukee. So -- but she, you know, she`s always
annoyed Stalin. Partof the reason for -- the reason was that she was Jewish, part of the reason was that she
was very independent, part of the reason was that she was a sort of feminist, and therefore had risen to being
a minister in the government in her own right. But part of it was that she`d been best friends with Stalin`s
wife, the late Nadia, who committed suicide. And Stalin never really forgave Paulina for being that close to
-- to Nadia. And so he`d always sort of planned to destroy her.

And he`d almost destroyed her in 1939. In fact, at one point, he said, "shall we kill her" -- he said
to Beria, "should we kill her in a fake car crash?" Anyway, but they decided not to. And she survived
another 10