Polina Semyonovna Zhemchuzhina (27 February 1897-1 April 1970) was a Soviet politician and the wife of Vyacheslav Molotov.
Biography[]
Perl Semyonovna Karpovskaya was born in Polohy, Yekaterinoslav Governorate, Russian Empire on 27 February 1897, the daughter of a Jewish tailor. She joined the Bolsheviks in 1918 and served as a Red Army propaganda commissar during the Russian Civil War, and she adopted the surname "Zhemchuzhina", meaning "pearl", like her first name. Zhemchuzhina married Vyacheslav Molotov in 1920, causing her parents to disown her for marrying a non-Jewish man. She served as director of the Soviet national cosmetics trust from 1932 to 1936, Minister of Fisheries in 1939, and head of textiles production in the Ministry of Light Industry from 1939 to 1948, and she befriended Israeli envoy Golda Meir in 1948. In December 1948, she was arrested for treason and was sentenced to five years in a labor camp, and she was released after Joseph Stalin's death in 1953. In spite of her imprisonment, she continued to think highly of Stalin, and she also supported China's Cultural Revolution. Zhemchuzhina died in 1970.