The justice commissar without a law degree who ran Soviet courts for a decade, from the Great Terror through the war-crimes trials
In July 1940 Rychkov and Prosecutor Pankratyev ordered: any worker more than twenty minutes late after lunch or leaving more than twenty minutes early was to be prosecuted for absenteeism and could be imprisoned.
A Ural factory worker turned justice commissar, he was the only holder of the post without higher education. As a Military Collegium member he took part in the Moscow show trials and chaired mass counter-revolutionary proceedings in the east. Appointed People's Commissar of Justice in 1938, he ran Soviet courts for a decade through the last terror wave, wartime judicial administration, and the post-war open trials of German war criminals. In 1940 he co-signed the decree making twenty minutes' lateness a criminal offence. Dismissed in 1948 after clashing with Party cadres, he served in deputy military-prosecutor posts and retired in 1955.
Career Timeline
- 1909–1917Apprentice turner and metal turner, Nadezhdinsky plant, Urals
- 1917–1918Secretary, Nadezhdinsky Soviet Executive Committee
- 1918–1920Cheka organs, Urals
- 1921–1922Deputy Chairman, Military Tribunal of the 5th Army, Irkutsk
- 1922–1927Prosecutor, Siberian Military District
- 1927–1931Deputy Prosecutor, Workers' and Peasants' Red Army
- 1931–1937Member, Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court (divvoenyurist, 1936)
- 1937.8–1938.1Prosecutor of the RSFSR
- 1938.1–1948.1People's Commissar (Minister from 1946) of Justice of the USSR
- 1947–1948Chairman, Permanent Commission for Open Trials of German war criminals
- 1948–1955Deputy Military Prosecutor, Ground Forces → Deputy Chief Military Prosecutor (retired 1955)
Related historical events
Open War-Crimes Trials and the Permanent Commission
On 21 November 1945, the day after the Nuremberg Tribunal opened, the Politburo adopted a resolution 'On the Conduct of Trials of Former Servicemen of the German Army and German Punitive Bodies.' It ordered open trials of war criminals in eight Soviet cities and named a preparatory commission: Andrei Vyshinsky as chairman, Nikolai Rychkov as deputy chairman, joined by Golyakov, Kruglov, Abakumov, and Afanasyev. As People's Commissar of Justice, Rychkov managed the practical work.
Between December 1945 and February 1946, open military-tribunal trials were held in eight cities: Smolensk, Bryansk, Leningrad, Nikolaev, Minsk, Kiev, Velikiye Luki, and Riga. Among the 84 defendants were 18 German generals as well as Wehrmacht and SS officers and soldiers. Sixty-six were sentenced to death by hanging and nineteen to hard-labour terms of up to twenty years. The verdicts itemised mass killings of civilians and abuses of prisoners across occupied Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltics, and Russia. The trials observed procedural forms: defendants received Soviet defence counsel, foreign journalists attended, and Pravda and Izvestiya printed Nuremberg dispatches alongside reports on these 'Soviet Nurembergs' on the same page. The condemned were publicly hanged on the central squares of the cities where they had been tried.
From autumn 1947 Rychkov chaired the Permanent Commission for Open Trials of German war criminals and directed a second wave. Nine trials (in Stalino (Donetsk), Bobruisk, Poltava, Vitebsk, Gomel, Chernigov, Kishinev, Novgorod, and Sevastopol) now included Hungarian and Romanian defendants as well as Germans. By this stage the maximum penalty was twenty-five years' hard labour rather than execution. The trials served the dual purpose of documenting Nazi crimes in Soviet territory for the international record and projecting an image of Soviet legality abroad and at home in the post-war period.
Strikingly, these open trials were fundamentally different in character from the Moscow show trials and the closed 'counter-revolutionary' proceedings in the eastern regions in which Rychkov himself had taken part as a member of the Military Collegium in the late 1930s. Where those had been instruments of terror that rapidly executed predetermined verdicts, the 1945–1947 open war-crimes trials followed the forms of modern criminal procedure (presentation of evidence, appointed counsel, press access, and published judgments) and tried real war crimes. They constitute the most complex episode of Rychkov's career.