Andrey Vyshinsky

• 1. Introduction

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  Andrey Vyshinsky is remembered for a chilling line attributed to him from the Stalin era: "Give me a man and I will find the crime." Vyshinsky was a Soviet politician, jurist and diplomat, best known as the state prosecutor at Joseph Stalin's Moscow Trials and later at the Nuremberg trials. He served as Soviet Foreign Minister from 1949 to 1953, having been Deputy Foreign Minister under Vyacheslav Molotov since 1940. As a minor police official in 1917, he had even signed an order to arrest Vladimir Lenin, on charges of being a "German spy." How does a man who once tried to jail Lenin end up as one of Stalin's most feared prosecutors? And how does that same prosecutor end up representing the Soviet Union at the United Nations? The chapters ahead trace that path, through prison cells, show trials, and wartime conference tables.

• 2. Baku To The Bar

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  Odessa is where Vyshinsky was born, into a Polish Catholic family that later moved to Baku. Early biographies describe his father, Yanuary Vyshinsky, as a "well-prospering," "experienced inspector." Later, undocumented accounts from the Stalin era, including the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, call him a pharmaceutical chemist instead. As a talented student, Vyshinsky married Kara Mikhailova and grew drawn to revolutionary politics. He entered Kiev University in 1901, only to be expelled the following year for taking part in revolutionary activity.

  Baku pulled him back in, and in 1903 he joined the Menshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. He took an active part in the 1905 Russian Revolution, and paid for it: a prison sentence in 1908, served in Baku. There he met a fellow inmate named Stalin, and the two argued ideology together behind bars. After his release, he returned home to Baku for the birth of his daughter Zinaida in 1909. He went back to Kiev University soon after and graduated in 1913, doing well enough to be considered for a professorship. His political past caught up with him instead, and he was forced back to Baku.

  Moscow is where he chose to practise law next, and he built a successful career there. He stayed an active Menshevik throughout, delivering passionate, incendiary speeches and taking a hand in city government. That courtroom reputation, and his standing in city government, would carry weight when the empire itself began to crack.

• 3. From Commissioner To Bolshevik

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  February 1917 put Vyshinsky in a new post, police commissioner of Moscow's Yakimanka District, inside a government already crumbling. That October, the Provisional Government fell, and the offices he had served under dissolved along with it. By then he had grown reacquainted with Stalin, who had become an important Bolshevik leader.

  Vyshinsky soon joined the staff of the People's Commissariat of Food, the body responsible for feeding Moscow. With backing from Stalin, Alexei Rykov, and Lev Kamenev, his influence and prestige climbed steadily. In 1920, after the Civil War ended with the defeat of the Whites under Denikin, he joined the Bolsheviks outright.

  Nikolai Krylenko became Vyshinsky's rival around this time, after Vyshinsky joined the nomenklatura as a prosecutor in the new Soviet legal system. In 1925, he was elected rector of Moscow University, and set about clearing it of "unsuitable" students and professors.

  In 1928, Vyshinsky presided over the Shakhty Trial, brought against 53 people accused of counter-revolutionary sabotage as "wreckers," with Krylenko as prosecutor. The outcome was never seriously in doubt. Historian Arkady Vaksberg later wrote that "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."

  November and December 1930 brought the Industrial Party Trial, with Vyshinsky presiding as judge and Krylenko again prosecuting. International protest followed, but all eight defendants confessed their guilt regardless. Vyshinsky was promoted as a result. In April 1933, he prosecuted the Metro-Vickers trial, where eight of the 18 defendants were British engineers; the sentences handed down were comparatively light. He also oversaw administrative preparations for a campaign against "harvest-wreckers and grain-thieves." That same year, Moscow was preparing an entirely new prosecutor's office, one Vyshinsky would soon fill.

• 4. Queen Of Evidence

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  The 30th of June 1933 marked the creation of a new office in Soviet law, and Vyshinsky was named its First Deputy Procurator General. He now outranked Krylenko, though he remained nominally junior to Ivan Akulov.

  In January 1935, Vyshinsky prosecuted Grigory Zinoviev and 18 other former supporters of the Left Opposition. They stood accused of "moral responsibility" for the assassination of Sergei Kirov.

  By June 1935, Vyshinsky had replaced Akulov, who had reportedly questioned linking Zinoviev's group to Kirov's murder. From then on, he served as the legal architect of Stalin's Great Purge. He acted as judge, yet pushed investigators to secure confessions from the accused. In some cases, he drafted the indictment before the investigation itself was finished.

  His book, Theory of Judicial Proofs in Soviet Justice, won the Stalin Prize in 1947 and laid out a theoretical basis for the entire Soviet judicial system. He pointed to his own speeches from the Moscow Trials as a model for how defendants' statements could serve as primary evidence. He is remembered for the underlying principle, cited in his name, that the confession of the accused is "the queen of evidence."

  The Semenchuk case of 1936 first made Vyshinsky a nationally known figure. Konstantin Semenchuk headed the Glavsevmorput station on Wrangel Island, and stood accused of oppressing and starving the local Yupik. He was also accused of ordering his subordinate, sledge driver Stepan Startsev, to murder Dr. Nikolai Vulfson on the 27th of December 1934. Rumor at the time linked the killing instead to Startsev's jealousy over Vulfson's wife, Dr. Gita Feldman. The case reached the Supreme Court of the RSFSR in May 1936. Vyshinsky attacked both defendants as "human waste"; both were found guilty and shot. Descriptions of the trial called its most publicised result "the joy of the liberated Eskimos."

  Historian Robert W. Thurston notes that between 1932 and 1936, Vyshinsky stood for what he calls "due process, careful judgements on the basis of evidence, a strong role for defense lawyers in all cases, firm legal codes that applied equally to the entire population, and a strengthening of the law." In February 1936, Vyshinsky even wrote to Molotov calling for a reduction of NKVD power, criticizing its ability to summarily arrest, exile, or imprison people. That contradiction between his 1936 caution about the secret police and the show trials just ahead would only sharpen with time.

• 5. Architect Of Terror

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  Vyshinsky punctuated his courtroom speeches with phrases like "Dogs of the Fascist bourgeoisie," "mad dogs of Trotskyism," "dregs of society," and "decayed people." Historian Arkady Vaksberg said the effect was "a hitherto unknown type of trial where there was not the slightest need for evidence: what evidence did you need when you were dealing with" what he called "stinking carrion" and "mad dogs."

  During the trials, Vyshinsky took for himself the house and money of Leonid Serebryakov, one of the defendants in the Moscow Trials. Serebryakov was later executed.

  In April 1937, Vyshinsky denounced Yevgeny Pashukanis, the Soviet Union's foremost legal scholar and a former Deputy People's Commissar for Justice, branding him a "wrecker." It marked the start of a purge inside the prosecutor's own ranks, one Vyshinsky himself carried out. Ninety percent of provincial prosecutors were removed, and many of them were arrested. Pashukanis was executed later that same year.

  Mikhail Ishov, a military procurator based in West Siberia, once approached Vyshinsky's office during the Great Purge, trying to stop the arrest of innocent people in his territory. Vyshinsky told him plainly: "You have lost your sense of party and class. We don't intend to pat enemies on the head.... If the enemy doesn't surrender, he must be destroyed." After the meeting, Vyshinsky reported Ishov to the authorities. Ishov was arrested and sentenced to five years in a labor camp.

  Roland Freisler, a Nazi judge who served as State Secretary of the Reich Ministry of Justice, studied Vyshinsky's trials in 1938. He wanted to bring the same approach to the show trials of Nazi Germany.

  May 1939 brought Vyshinsky a new title, Deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, roughly equivalent to deputy prime minister. His new portfolio covered education and culture, and he directed efforts to convert the written alphabets of conquered peoples into Cyrillic script. In June 1939, he presided over the All-Union Conference of Stage Directors. On the 15th of June, Vsevolod Meyerhold, the Soviet Union's most renowned living stage director, gave the fourth speech in the main debate. The Soviet press reported only that his speech had been "severely criticised." Five days later, Meyerhold was arrested, tortured, and shot. Within a year, this same portfolio would pull Vyshinsky toward an entirely different stage, international diplomacy.

• 6. Wartime Diplomat

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  June 1937 brought Vyshinsky his first real diplomatic assignment, negotiations over trade debts with the American ambassador in Moscow, Joseph E. Davies. After the last of the major show trials wrapped up in March 1938, he entered a new phase of his career, centered on foreign affairs. He held diplomats in fairly low regard, since they often complained about how the trials were playing in the West.

  Maxim Litvinov was one of the only diplomats in the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs to survive the Great Purge's losses. Even he was dismissed in 1939, and replaced by Vyacheslav Molotov.

  In 1939, Vyshinsky introduced a motion to the Supreme Soviet to bring Western Ukraine into the USSR. Between June and August 1940, he was sent to Latvia to oversee the installation of a pro-Soviet government and its absorption into the Union. He purged the Latvian Communist Party of Trotskyists, Bukharinites, and suspected foreign agents along the way. A Latvian Soviet Republic was proclaimed in July 1940, and swiftly admitted to the USSR.

  On the 6th of September 1940, that success earned Vyshinsky the post of First Deputy People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs. Stalin, Lavrentiy Beria, and Molotov all began to trust him more closely. His main responsibility was Eastern Europe, and he was the official British Ambassador Stafford Cripps dealt with directly. It was Vyshinsky whom Cripps informed of Winston Churchill's warning that Germany might be preparing to invade the USSR. Vyshinsky refused to even discuss it.

  After Germany invaded, Vyshinsky was moved to the wartime shadow capital at Kuibyshev, where he spent much of the war. He tried to build rapport with British Ambassador Archibald Clark Kerr and with visiting Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie. During the 1943 Tehran Conference, he stayed behind in the Soviet Union to "keep shop" while the top leadership traveled abroad. Stalin placed him on the Allied Control Council for Italian affairs. There he organized the repatriation of Soviet prisoners of war, including some who did not want to return. He also opened contact with the Italian Communist Party in Naples.

  In February 1945, Vyshinsky accompanied Stalin, Molotov, and Beria to the Yalta Conference. From there he was sent on to Romania, where he arranged for a communist regime to take power later that year. He then rejoined the Soviet leadership at the Potsdam Conference. On the 26th of February 1946, he rushed to Bucharest, where Soviet tanks surrounded the royal palace. There he forced King Michael of Romania to dismiss his anti-communist prime minister, General Nicolae Radescu. In his place, Vyshinsky installed the pro-communist Petru Groza.

  British diplomat Sir Frank Roberts, who served as chargé d'affaires in Moscow from February 1945 to October 1947, left a sharp portrait of him. Roberts wrote that Vyshinsky "spoke good French, was quick, clever and efficient, and always knew his dossier well." Still, he added that he felt no respect for him at all, unlike the grudging respect he held for Molotov. Roberts described Vyshinsky as giving "the impression of a cringing toadie only too anxious to obey His Master's Voice." He suggested that Vyshinsky's Menshevik past and "Polish and bourgeois background" made him unusually "servile and obsequious" around Stalin. The diplomatic skills forged in Bucharest and Yalta were about to be tested on an entirely different kind of stage.

• 7. Death And Legacy

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  Vyshinsky was responsible for the Soviet Union's preparations for the trial of the major German war criminals before the International Military Tribunal. In 1953, the Kersten Committee of the United States Congress named him among the chief figures behind the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states.

  He held the title of academician at the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union from 1939 onward. He also served as the Soviet Union's permanent representative to the United Nations.

  On the 22nd of November 1954, Vyshinsky died in New York City. A special flight carried his body back to Moscow, and his ashes were buried at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.

  Vyshinsky also directed the Academy of Sciences' Institute of State and Law. The institute carried his name until the period of de-Stalinization. Under his direction, it published several major monographs on the general theory of state and law. Long after his death, Vyshinsky's courtroom voice would resurface in unexpected places, far from any Soviet archive.

• 8. Echoes In Culture

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  The Pet Shop Boys sampled Vyshinsky's own voice on their 1990 album Behaviour. The track "This Must Be the Place I Waited Years to Leave" contains a recording of his speech from the 1936 Zinoviev-Kamenev trial.

  Amor Towles opened his 2016 novel A Gentleman in Moscow with Vyshinsky as prosecutor. The book presents a purported transcript of Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov's appearance before the Emergency Committee of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs. That hearing is dated to the 21st of June 1922.

  Gregor Martov's alternative history novel His New Majesty imagines a different outcome for Russia, one where Anton Denikin's White forces defeat the Bolsheviks in 1921. In that story, Vyshinsky joins the winning side and becomes royal prosecutor in a show trial. Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, and Bukharin are sentenced to death as "Subversives, Traitors, Blasphemers and Regicides." The restored czar rewards him with a dukedom. He is then assassinated by an anarchist woman with whom he had been secretly involved.

  In Sergei Loznitsa's 2025 film Two Prosecutors, Vyshinsky is portrayed by Anatoliy Beliy. A saying popular in Poland has also been attributed to him: "give me the man; there'll be a paragraph for him." It refers to the miscarriage of justice under communist regimes. That saying still circulates in Poland today, a small reminder of how far one prosecutor's words could travel.