Andrey Vyshinsky

Andrey Januaryevich Vyshinskiy (Russian: Андре́й Януа́рьевич Выши́нский, Andrej Januar'evič Vyšinskij; Chinese: 维辛斯基 Wéi xīn sī jī) December 10 [O.S. November 28] 1883 – November 22, 1954) was a Russian and Soviet jurist and diplomat. He is mostly known as a state prosecutor of Stalin's show trials. He served as the Soviet Foreign Minister from 1949 to 1953.

Biography

Vyshinsky was born into a Polish Catholic family in Odessa, who later moved to Baku. He became a Menshevik in 1903 and in 1917 he undersigned an order to arrest Lenin according the decision of the Russian Provisional Government.^[1]. In 1920, he joined the Bolsheviks.

In 1935 he became Prosecutor General of the USSR, the legal mastermind of Joseph Stalin's Great Purge. He is widely cited for the principle that "confession of the accused is the queen of evidence". His monograph that justifies this postulate, Theory of Judicial Proofs in Soviet Justice, was awarded the Stalin Prize in 1947. He was the prosecutor at the Moscow Trials of the Great Purge, lashing its defenseless victims with vituperative, sometimes cruelly witty rhetoric:^[2]

Shoot these rabid dogs. Death to this gang who hide their ferocious teeth, their eagle claws, from the people! Down with that vulture Trotsky, from whose mouth a bloody venom drips, putrefying the great ideals of Marxism!... Down with these abject animals! Let's put an end once and for all to these miserable hybrids of foxes and pigs, these stinking corpses! Let's exterminate the mad dogs of capitalism, who want to tear to pieces the flower of our new Soviet nation! Let's push the bestial hatred they bear our leaders back down their own throats!

During the trials Vyshinsky misappropriated the house and money of Leonid Serebryakov, one of the defendants of the infamous Moscow Trials, who was later executed ^[3]

In June, 1940, Vyshinskiy was sent to the Republic of Latvia^[4] to supervise establishment of puppet government and incorporation of country into USSR, and later arranged for a communist regime to assume control of Romania in 1945.^[5] Later he was among the main accused during the investigation of the occupation of the Baltic states by U.S. Congress Kersten Committee in 1953^[6]

He was responsible for the Soviet preparations for the trial of the major war criminals by the International Military Tribunal.

The positions he held include those of vice-premier (1939–1944), deputy Commissar for Foreign Affairs (deputy foreign minister effective 1946) (1940–1949), Minister for Foreign Affairs (1949-1953), Academician of the Soviet Academy of Sciences from 1939, and permanent representative of the Soviet Union to the United Nations.

He died while in New York and was buried near the Red Square.

Scholarship

Vyshinsky was the director of the Soviet Academy of Science's Institute of State and Law. In fact, until the period of Destalinization, the Institute of State and Law was named in his honor.

During his tenure as director of the ISL, Vyshinsky oversaw the publication of several important monographs on the general theory of state and law.

References

External links

• Vyshinsky speech at the 1936 trial of Zinoviev and Kamenev
• Venona transcript #1822

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