The USSR's first Prosecutor General who organized war crimes trials and handed Khrushchev the statistics of the Great Terror
In February 1954 Gorshenin handed Khrushchev the first official tally of everyone sentenced to death, exile, and camps for counter-revolutionary crimes from 1921 to 1954. Drawn up after Stalin's death, those figures launched the thaw-era rehabilitations.
Born to a railway-worker family in Alatyr, he graduated from the Moscow Institute of Soviet Law as a labour-law scholar. Named Prosecutor General in 1943, he sat on the secret Politburo commission approving all death sentences while organising the Vlasov and Krasnov trials and preparing the Soviet case for Nuremberg and Tokyo. As Minister of Justice (1948–1956) he worked to regularise the courts, yet in February 1954 he submitted to Khrushchev the first official tally of victims repressed from 1921 onward, and in 1956 he co-initiated with Zhukov and Rudenko the Central Committee resolution rehabilitating former POWs. After the ministry was abolished he returned to academia, directing the All-Union Institute of Legal Sciences and working on the codification of Soviet labour law.
Activities and affiliations
- 1937–1956 Law and justice · Soviet Union
Career Timeline
- 1935–1937Deputy Director for academic affairs, Kazan Institute of Soviet Law
- 1937–1940Head of educational institutions, board member, USSR People's Commissariat of Justice
- 1940–1943People's Commissar of Justice, RSFSR
- 1943–1948Prosecutor/Prosecutor General of the USSR (title 'General' from 1946)
- 1943–1947Member, secret Politburo commission on death sentences
- 1948–1956Minister of Justice of the USSR
- 1952–1956Candidate member, CPSU Central Committee
- 1956–1963Director, All-Union Institute of Legal Sciences
- 1963–1967Head of labour and social security legislation sector, VNIISZ
Related historical events
Organising the open war-crimes trials, 1943-1949
One of the central judicial tasks of the war years was to bring the massacres committed in the occupied territories before public courts. Gorshenin took office as Prosecutor of the USSR on 13 November 1943, and the trial held in Kharkov on 15-18 December 1943 became the first open Soviet trial of foreign war criminals. Three defendants, German officers and soldiers alongside a Soviet collaborator, were found guilty under Article 1 of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet decree of 19 April 1943 and sentenced to death by hanging; they were executed the next day in Kharkov's Blagoveshchensky market before some 40,000 residents. Some of the material from these first tribunals was later submitted as evidence to the Nuremberg tribunal, which enshrined the legal precedent established at Kharkov that an order does not absolve one of responsibility for genocide.
From 1948 Gorshenin headed the Permanent Commission for holding open trials in the most important cases of former servicemen of the German army and German punitive organs exposed in atrocities against Soviet citizens on temporarily occupied territory. Between 1943 and 1949 nineteen open trials of foreign defendants were held in various Soviet cities, ending in the conviction of 252 foreigners, the overwhelming majority of them German servicemen; some were sentenced to public hanging, the rest to hard labour. The proceedings were open, held in large halls to which journalists and ordinary citizens were admitted, in some cases broadcast into the streets, and the defendants were provided with Soviet defence counsel. Gorshenin took part in organising the trials of Japanese war criminals as well as German ones. In late November 1949 he joined Interior Minister Kruglov and Prosecutor General Safonov in proposing to Molotov that the defendants of the Khabarovsk trial be reclassified and tried under the decree of 19 April 1943, on the reasoning that although Japanese military personnel were not named in that decree their criminal activity was analogous to that of the German fascist army; on 5 December 1949 the charge was accordingly changed for all the accused.
As prosecutor, then, Gorshenin designed and ran the legal machinery by which the state publicly punished war crimes. Yet he did so alongside his other role: as a member of the secret Politburo commission on judicial matters he confirmed death sentences across the USSR, and later he himself carried to Khrushchev the statistics of everyone punished for counter-revolutionary crimes since 1921. That the same institution and the same official managed both the public reckoning of war crimes and the unpublicised machinery of mass repression against Soviet citizens is the defining feature of this period of his career.