The Moscow-trial prosecutor turned early Cold War foreign minister
At the UN in 1947, Vyshinsky faced Eleanor Roosevelt and George Marshall and denounced the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan as turning relief into a "political weapon."
A jurist of Menshevik origin who joined the Bolsheviks in 1920 and served as rector of Moscow State University (1925–1928). As USSR Procurator General (1935–1939), he served as state prosecutor in the Moscow show trials, elevating the confession to 'the queen of evidence' in Soviet courtroom practice; his Theory of Judicial Evidence in Soviet Law (Stalin Prize, 1947) laid the theoretical foundation for Soviet criminal procedure. After the war he effectively directed the Soviet delegation at Nuremberg and, as Foreign Minister (1949–1953), became the voice of late-Stalinist hardline diplomacy at the United Nations. He died of a heart attack in New York in 1954.
Career Timeline
- 1949–1953Minister of Foreign Affairs
Related historical events
- 1932–1933The Holodomor and the Collectivisation FamineUSSR Prosecutor General; public face and enforcer of the 'Law of Spikelets'As USSR Prosecutor General, he authored the 1933 brochure that coined the popular name 'Law of Spikelets'; in 1936 he reported 79% of 115,000 cases under the decree had been wrongly applied.
- 1937–1938The Great PurgeState prosecutorAs state prosecutor at the Moscow Trials, he prosecuted leading defendants.
- 1941–1945The Great Patriotic WarDeputy foreign minister involved in wartime diplomacy and anti-Nazi propaganda
- 1945.02–08The Yalta and Potsdam ConferencesOn the delegation as deputy foreign commissar.
- 1947–1948The Marshall Plan and the Cold WarUN diplomacyAt the UN he denounced the Marshall Plan as a tool of aggression.
State Prosecutor of the Moscow Show Trials
From 1936 to 1938 Vyshinsky served as state prosecutor in all three Moscow show trials. The first (August 1936) tried Zinoviev, Kamenev and 14 others; the second (January 1937) tried Pyatakov, Radek and 15 others; the third (March 1938) tried Bukharin, Rykov and 19 others. In the courtroom Vyshinsky demanded that 'traitors and spies who sold our Motherland to the enemy be shot like foul dogs,' lacing his speeches with 'filth,' 'mad dogs,' and 'stinking carrion.' He elevated the pretrial confession to the 'queen of evidence' and argued that the defendants' own Bolshevik pasts constituted definitive proof of counter-revolutionary conspiracy. Behind the scenes he and NKVD chief Yezhov processed vast numbers of cases extrajudicially through the so-called 'album' system: on 29 December 1937 alone they reviewed a list of 1,000 ethnic Latvians and sentenced 992 to death. He co-authored the indictment against Marshal Tukhachevsky. Every defendant Vyshinsky prosecuted in the three trials was executed.