Chief Soviet prosecutor at Nuremberg, the longest-serving head of the Soviet procuracy
On 8 February 1946 in Nuremberg, Rudenko opened the Soviet prosecution case by condemning the Nazi leadership for instilling in the German people 'the morals of cannibals and the greed of burglars.'
Born to a Ukrainian Cossack family, he joined the Party in 1926 and became Procurator of the Ukrainian SSR in 1944. At the Nuremberg Trials he served as the USSR's chief prosecutor, cross-examining Göring and laying bare the machinery of Nazi war crimes. Appointed Procurator General in 1953, he held the post for 28 years: leading the Beria prosecution, chairing the commission that rehabilitated victims of Stalinist repression under Khrushchev, and later collaborating with Andropov on 'prophylactic' measures against dissidents. He embodied the duality of the Soviet procuracy: an instrument of terror under Stalin and an architect of its post-Stalin legal consolidation.
Career Timeline
- 1929Senior investigator, Chernigov district procuracy
- 1937–1938Procurator of Donetsk Oblast
- 1938–1940Procurator of Stalino Oblast
- 1942–1944Deputy Procurator, Ukrainian SSR
- 1944–1953Procurator of the Ukrainian SSR
- 1945–1946Chief Soviet prosecutor, Nuremberg IMT
- 1953–1981Procurator General of the USSR
- 1961–1981Member, CPSU Central Committee
Related historical events
The Great Terror: Troika and Mass Executions
The darkest chapter of Rudenko's career came in 1937–1938, when as procurator of Donetsk (later Stalino) Oblast he served on the NKVD's special troika. Constituted under NKVD Order No. 00447, these three-man panels (a procurator, a party secretary, and the local NKVD chief) conducted rapid, summary proceedings against 'anti-Soviet elements.' According to archival researcher Konstantin Boguslavsky, who worked in the former KGB archive of the Ukrainian SSR, Rudenko personally signed off on the execution of 9,801 people under the 'kulak operation' and approximately 2,500 more under operations targeting 'national contingents': Germans, Poles, Latvians, Finns, and others. He was sometimes present at the executions themselves.
Beyond the grim statistics lies an irony of wartime accountability: less than a decade before he prosecuted Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, Rudenko had himself participated in mass killing of civilians, the very category of crime he later charged the defendants with. In 1954, after Stalin's death, Rudenko submitted to Khrushchev the statistics on repression from 1921 to 1954 and admitted: 'From the standpoint of legal norms, no data existed to convict these people. Everything rested solely on personal confessions, and personal confessions extracted through physical and moral torture cannot serve as a basis for conviction.' When Khrushchev objected that he had heard defendants confess with his own ears, Rudenko smiled and replied: 'That is the art of those who conducted the investigation and the trial. They apparently drove people to such a state that the only way to end the suffering and torment was to confess, and the next step was death.'