The Bolshevik elder called 'conscience of the party': jurist who confronted the Prosecutor General during the Great Terror
"I have known Trifonov for thirty years as a real Bolshevik — and you I know as a Menshevik!" — to Vyshinsky, 1938, defending an arrested comrade.
Bolshevik jurist (RSDLP from 1898). As architect of the party ethics system in the Central Control Commission, he was called 'the conscience of the party.' In 1937 he publicly denounced Vyshinsky for fabricating cases and was forcibly committed to a psychiatric hospital, where he died.
Career Timeline
- 1898Joined the RSDLP
- 1903–1905Arrested in Ekaterinoslav for an underground press; 6-year sentence, released early in 1905
- 1905–1917Exile in Tyumen, Turinsk and Narym; published the first illegal newspaper Tyumensky Rabochy
- 1917Moscow party committee; editorial board of Sotsial-Demokrat and Pravda
- 1920–1934Member and Presidium member (1923–1934) of the Central Control Commission; built party ethics and discipline
- 1921–1934Judge of the RSFSR and USSR Supreme Courts; head of Rabkrin legal department
- 1935–1938.2Deputy Prosecutor of the USSR under Vyshinsky; Chairman of the Judicial Collegium of the Supreme Court
- 1938.2–1945Forcibly committed to a psychiatric clinic after denouncing Vyshinsky; later archivist at the Museum of Peoples
Related historical events
"Conscience of the Party" — The Central Control Commission and Party Ethics
Aron Solts earned the title "conscience of the party" through 14 years of work (1920–1934) in the Central Control Commission (TsKK). As a Presidium member, he systematized party ethical norms and disciplinary procedures, and in 1925 published the pamphlet On Party Ethics (О партийной этике), giving theoretical shape to the concept of "partethics" (партэтика). For Solts, party ethics was not mere rule compliance: it was a moral principle demanding that Bolsheviks place public duty above private interest. He fiercely criticized abuses of power, privilege, and corruption, and practiced what he preached with extreme personal austerity. During the famine years, workers who came to inspect his home found only two frozen potatoes. This moral rigor led directly to his confrontation with Andrei Vyshinsky during the Great Terror. At an October 1937 Sverdlovsk party aktiv conference, Solts publicly accused the Prosecutor General of fabricating cases and demanded a special commission to investigate him: a veiled challenge to the leadership, sharpened by his reminder that Vyshinsky was once a Menshevik. Despite Solts's personal bond with Stalin from shared Narym exile in 1912, he was promptly removed from the procuracy and forcibly committed to a psychiatric hospital.