Kilde: Molotov om sin kone Polina og hendes arrestation

[…] To med befell the happiness to have had her as my wife. Beautiful, intelligent, and, the main thing, a genuine Bolshevik, a genuine Soviet person. Because she was my wife, her life didn’t go at all smoothly. Although she suffered through difficult times, she understood everything. She never cursed Stalin, and she wouldn’t allow anyone to do that in her presence, for she realized that anyone who denigrated Stalin would in time be jettisoned as an element alien to our party and to our people. 

[…]

Why did he [Stalin] go after med the way he did? Perhaps she had something to do with it.

At the session of the Politburo when he read out the material on Polina Semenovna supplied by the security people, my knees began to knock. This was not a question of some intrigue.

Security had done a thorough job on her. They had outdone themselves. What did they accuse her of? Of connections with a Zionist organisation and with Golda Meir, the Israeli ambassador. Security charged that they sought to make a Crimea a Jewish autonomous region […] They had good relations with the great Jewish actor Mikhoels […] Security found he was an alien element.

Of course, she should have been more fastidious in choosing her acquaintances. She was removed from office but for some time was not arrested. Then she was taken into custody and summoned to the Central Committee. A black cat had, as they say, crossed our path. Relations between med and Stalin cooled.

She was in prison for a year an in exile more than three years. At the Politburo meetings Beria would walk past me and whisper into my ear, “Polina is alive”! She served time in the Lubianka prison in Moscow, and I didn’t even know she was there.

And yet you continued to be the second most powerful man in the state?

Yes, formally. For the press and for public consumption. She was freed from exile the day after Stalin’s funeral. She didn’t even know that Stalin had died, so her first question was, “How’s Stalin?” The news of his illness had reached her. Taking advantage of Beria’s invitation, I arrived at his office to pick her up. Hardly had I walked up to her when Beria ran ahead of me to Polina and exclaimed, “A heroine”!

She certainly endured great hardhip, but I repeat, she never changed her attitude towards Stalin. She always thought highly of him.

[…]

People say that Stalin demanded that you get a divorce but that you refused. He demanded that you dissociate yourself from her.
In the first place, they had separated me from her. You see, back in 1940 when they voted to exclude her from the Central Committee, I abstained, that’s true. Later he said, “People are talking as if you voted against”. Shed had been a candidate member of he CC when she was excluded. They accused her…what didn’t they think up! Everything was very confused. Zhdanov, it seems, laid out the case against her. Wreckers had been exposed in the fisheries industry where she worked. According to the charge, it all started in Uzbekistan. Later she worked in the cosmetics industry, in perfumery, and had allegedly employed some shady characters. (Naturally, there were no other kind.) German spies were uncovered there. They availed themselves of the presence of wives of our most prominent leaders, who went to her for the latest in cosmetics.
But when she was arrested in 1949 they accused her of plotting an attempt on Stalin’s life. Vyshinsky then put in his oar. Before I was removed from the Ministry og Foreign Affairs, Stalin came up to me at the CC and said. “You have to divorce your wife!” She then said to me, “If the party needs this, then we shall get a divorce!” At the end of 1948 we were divorced. But in 1949, in February, she was arrested.

[…]

My wife was arrested not without his [Stalin’s] knowledge; indeed, he personally ordered it.