Andrei Vyshinsky

Andrey Yanuaryevich Vyshinsky (Андре́й Януа́рьевич Выши́нский; Andrzej Wyszyński) (10 December 1883 – 22 November 1954) was a Soviet politician, jurist and diplomat.

He is best known as a state prosecutor of Joseph Stalin's Moscow Trials and in the Nuremberg trials.

He began attending the Kiev University in 1901, but was expelled in 1902 for participating in revolutionary activities.

Vyshinsky returned to Baku, became a member of the Menshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1903 and took an active part in the 1905 Russian Revolution.

As a result, in 1908 he was sentenced to prison and a few days later was sent to Bayil prison in Baku to serve his sentence.

Here he first met Stalin: a fellow-inmate with whom he engaged in ideological disputes.

After his release, he returned home to Baku for the birth of his daughter Zinaida in 1909.

Soon thereafter, he returned to Kiev University and did quite well, graduating in 1913.

He was even considered for a professorship, but his political past caught up with him, and he was forced to return to Baku.

Determined to practise law, he tried Moscow, where he became a successful lawyer, remained an active Menshevik, gave many passionate and incendiary speeches, and became involved in city government.

After the February Revolution in 1917, he was appointed police commissioner of the Yakimanka District.

As a minor official, he undersigned an order to arrest Vladimir Lenin on charges of being a "German spy", according to the decision of the Minister of Justice of the Russian Provisional Government, but the October Revolution quickly intervened, and the offices which had ordered the arrest were dissolved.

In 1917, he became reacquainted with Stalin, who had become an important Bolshevik leader.

Consequently, he joined the staff of the People's Commissariat of Food, which was responsible for Moscow's food supplies, and with the help of Stalin, Alexei Rykov, and Lev Kamenev, he began to rise in influence and prestige.

In 1920, after the defeat of the Whites under Denikin, and the end of the Russian Civil War, he joined the Bolsheviks.

Becoming a member of the nomenklatura he became a prosecutor in the new Soviet legal system, began a rivalry with a fellow lawyer, Nikolai Krylenko, and in 1925 was elected rector of Moscow University, which he began to clear of "unsuitable" students and professors.

In 1928, he presided over the Shakhty Trial against 53 alleged counter-revolutionary "wreckers".

Krylenko acted as prosecutor, and the outcome was never in doubt.

As historian Arkady Vaksberg explains, "all the court's attention was concentrated not on analyzing the evidence, which simply did not exist, but on securing from the accused confirmation of their confessions of guilt that were contained in the records of the preliminary investigation."

In November–December 1930, he presided as judge over the Industrial Party Trial, with Krylenko as prosecutor, which was accompanied by a storm of international protest.

In this case, all eight defendants confessed their guilt.

As a result, he was promoted.

In April 1933, he was prosecutor in the Metro-Vickers trial, at which eight out of 18 defendants were British engineers, and which resulted in relatively light sentences.

He carried out administrative preparations for a "systematic" drive "against harvest-wreckers and grain-thieves".

Vyshinsky was appointed First Deputy Procurator General of the Soviet Union when the office was first created on 30 June 1933.

At this time, he outranked Krylenko but was nominally junior to Ivan Akulov.

In January 1935, he prosecuted Grigory Zinoviev and 18 other former supporters of the Left Opposition, who were accused of 'moral responsibility' for the assassination of Sergei Kirov.

In June 1935, Vyshinsky replaced Akulov, who had allegedly questioned the decision to link Zinoviev and others to the Kirov murder, and from thereon he was the legal mastermind of Joseph Stalin's Great Purge.

Although he acted as a judge, he encouraged investigators to procure confessions from the accused.

In some cases, he prepared the indictments before the "investigation" was concluded.

Vyshinsky first became a nationally known public figure as a result of the Semenchuk case of 1936.

Konstantin Semenchuk was the head of the Glavsevmorput station on Wrangel Island.

In his Theory of Judicial Proofs in Soviet Justice (Stalin Prize in 1947) he laid a theoretical base for the Soviet judicial system.

He also used his own speeches from the Moscow Trials as an example of how defendants' statements could be used as primary evidence.

Vyshinsky is cited for the principle that "confession of the accused is the queen of evidence".

He was the Soviet Foreign Minister from 1949 to 1953, after having served as Deputy Foreign Minister under Vyacheslav Molotov since 1940.

He also headed the Institute of State and Law in the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union.

Vyshinsky was born in Odessa into a Polish Catholic family, which later moved to Baku.

Early biographies portray his father, Yanuary Vyshinsky (Januarius Wyszyński), as a "well-prospering" "experienced inspector" (Russian: Ревизор); while later, undocumented, Stalin-era biographies such as that in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia make him a pharmaceutical chemist.

A talented student, Andrei Vyshinsky married Kara Mikhailova and became interested in revolutionary ideas.