Andrey Vyshinsky

Soviet jurist and foreign minister

• Born: December 10, 1883
• Birthplace: Odessa, Russia
• Died: November 22, 1954
• Place of death: New York, New York

Cause of notoriety: As procurator of Joseph Stalin’s infamous show trials, Vyshinsky presided over the death sentences of dozens of innocent defendants.

Active: 1933-1939

Locale: Moscow

Early Life

Three years after the birth of Andrey Vyshinsky (AHN-dray vih-SHIHN-skee) in Odessa, his family moved to Baku, where Andrey earned excellent grades at the gymnasium (secondary school) and enjoyed the cultural activities hosted by his parents. It was in Baku that Vyshinsky met Kapitolina Isidorovna Mikhailova, with whom he enjoyed a happy marriage until his death. Vyshinsky left Baku to study law at Kiev University, from which he was soon dismissed because of his illegal Marxist activities. Returning to Baku, he joined the Social Democratic Party and in 1905 played a major role in a railway workers’ strike. During this period Vyshinsky was organizing his party’s armed forces and directing the assassinations of police collaborators.

Vyshinsky’s part in the railway strike led to his arrest in January, 1906, but he remained free until February, 1908, when the Tiflis court sentenced him to a year in Baku’s Bailovka Prison. It was there that he first met and debated politics with Koba, or Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, who would later be known as Joseph Stalin. Vyshinsky was released in October, 1908, and Stalin a few days later; it would be ten years before the two met again.

Vyshinsky reenrolled at Kiev University. Despite his brilliant performance in law studies, he became a tutor in a private gymnasium. He then went to Moscow and became an assistant to a prominent attorney and labored in the service of the February, 1917, revolution as a member of the moderate minority wing of the Russian Social Democratics, the Mensheviks, who called for gradual social reform. Attaining the rank of militia commissar in Moscow, he then became chairman of the Yakimanka district’s first division. Stalin by now was an influential Bolshevik and people’s commissar on nationality affairs, and after the October Revolution Vyshinsky became a deputy special commissar of food and transport. With a nod from the powerful Stalin, Vyshinsky abandoned the Mensheviks and in February, 1920, joined the Russian Communist Party of the more radical Bolsheviks. With this change in ideologies, Vyshinsky was poised to become the enforcer of Stalin’s purges.

Political Career

Vyshinsky’s first nefarious chore came in 1928 when, as chairman of an ad hoc “Special Judicial Presence,” he presided over the trial of fifty-three engineers accused of being a “wrecking organization” in the town of Shakhty in the Rostov region. Eleven of the defendants were sentenced to death. Thus having demonstrated his abilities in his new career, Vyshinsky assumed in 1930 the same role in the trial of eight prominent scientists. His biographer Arkady Vaksberg sees this trial as Stalin’s “important rehearsal for what was to go down in history as ’The Great Terror’” and as a precedent to “pave the way for a psychological attack on the population.” For his superb orchestration of these two trials, in May, 1931, Vyshinsky was appointed procurator of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation (RSFSR) and deputy people’s commissar of justice of the RSFSR.

The murder of Sergei Kirov—probably at Stalin’s order—in December, 1934, led to the important trial of Grigory Yevseyevich Zinovyev and Lev Kamenev in August, 1936, the first of those show trials in which the defendants would be coerced into pleading guilty and Vyshinsky would be responsible for masterminding the bogus testimony. According to witnesses, Vyshinsky took a personal role in threatening the two victims, both of whom were subsequently executed.

The most infamous show trial was that of Nikolay Bukharin and Aleksey Ivanovich Rykov in 1938. Bukharin had been close to Vladimir Ilich Lenin and enjoyed a high position in the Bolshevik hierarchy, and it was certainly his status and prestige that condemned him. Vaksberg quotes Vyshinsky’s telling remark in 1937 that “One has to remember Comrade Stalin’s instruction that there are sometimes periods . . . when the laws prove obsolete and have to be set aside.” Bukharin was courageous in remarks to Vyshinsky but succeeded only in eliciting Vyshinsky’s crudest insults.

With these public trials for world consumption completed, Vyshinsky continued as procurator general until June, 1939, when Stalin appointed him deputy chairman of the Soviet People’s Commissariat. In March, 1949, Stalin replaced Vyacheslav Molotov as foreign minister with Vyshinsky, who gave scurrilous speeches at the United Nations and, shortly after Stalin’s death in March of 1953, became the Soviet Union’s permanent delegate to that body.

On Saturday, November 20, 1954, the Soviet diplomatic delegation left for Glen Cove, New York, where Vyshinsky had planned to prepare a speech arguing that the International Atomic Energy Agency should be accountable to the United Nations and the Security Council. Vyshinsky remained in his Park Avenue apartment, fell ill the next day, and died on the morning of November 22 of a heart attack.

Impact

Of all the baleful figures in Stalin’s entourage, none was more destructive of civic freedom than Andrey Vyshinsky. It was in his role as the mastermind behind the show trials that Vyshinsky had the strongest effect on Soviet history. Vyshinsky also used his post as deputy chairman of the Soviet People’s Commissariat to demoralize Soviet artists and publicize Socialist Realism in such films as Lenin (1918) and Traktoristy (1939; Tractor-Drivers). His influence in this appointment cast a dark shadow over Soviet art of the decade.

Bibliography

Bukharin, Nikolay. How It All Began: The Prison Novel. Translated by George Shriver. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. The distinguished Bolshevik Bukharin was probably Vyshinsky’s most important victim, and Stephen F. Cohen’s introduction to this novel is informative.

Koestler, Arthur. Darkness at Noon. Translated by Daphne Hardy. London: Jonathan Cape, 1940. This famous novel, reprinted many times, focuses on the plight of the old Bolsheviks.

Sebag Montefiore, Simon. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. Outstanding biography of the Russian dictator, with many appearances by Vyshinsky.

Vaksberg, Arkady. Stalin’s Prosecutor: The Life of Andrei Vishinsky. Translated by Jan Butler. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990. An excellent biography by a lawyer who knew Vyshinsky personally.