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.
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