Stalin's Moscow-trial prosecutor who later carried hardline Soviet diplomacy to the UN
At the UN General Assembly on 18 September 1947, then only Deputy Foreign Minister, Vyshinsky denounced the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan for using relief "as an instrument of political pressure."
Born in Odessa into a Polish szlachta (gentry) family, he moved to Baku as a child and joined the Menshevik wing of the RSDLP in 1903; arrested twice in 1906–1907 and sentenced by a Tiflis court in 1908 to a year in Bailov prison, where he met Stalin. He graduated from Kiev University in 1913, practiced law, and joined the Bolsheviks in 1920. He was RSFSR prosecutor (1931), Deputy Procurator (1933) and Procurator of the USSR (1935–1939), and served as state prosecutor in all three Moscow processes of 1936–1938. From May 1939 he was Deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, and from 1940 to 1946 First Deputy People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs; he effectively directed the Soviet delegation at Nuremberg. As Minister of Foreign Affairs (1949–1953) and then permanent representative to the UN (1953–1954), he died of a heart attack in New York on 22 November 1954.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1949–1953Minister of Foreign Affairs
The Soviet Politburo
- Candidate 1952.10–1953.03
1953.03 removed
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.
- 1939.09–1941.06The annexation of the Baltic states and the June 1941 deportationEmissary to LatviaStayed in Latvia from June to August to supervise the pro-Soviet government and incorporation.
- 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.
- 1944–1949The People's Democracies of Eastern EuropeDeputy foreign minister sent to BucharestHe arrived in Bucharest on 27 February 1945 and demanded that King Michael I dismiss the Rădescu government and install Groza.
- 1944–1948Romania: From 23 August to the People's RepublicDeputy foreign minister sent to BucharestArriving in Bucharest on 27 February 1945, he demanded the Rădescu government's dismissal the next day on a two-hour deadline, rejected the king's choice of Știrbei and named Groza.
- 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.
Diplomatic Career, 1940–1954
Entering diplomacy
In June to August 1940 Vyshinsky served as the Central Committee's plenipotentiary for Latvia, supervising the establishment of a pro-Soviet government and the country's incorporation into the USSR, and setting out to purge the Latvian Communist Party of Trotskyists, Bukharinites and alleged foreign agents. On 6 September 1940 he became First Deputy People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs, holding the post until March 1946, and he directed the Commissariat's work during its evacuation to Kuibyshev. After the German invasion he remained in Kuibyshev for much of the war, and during the 1943 Tehran Conference he stayed in the country to keep the work going while most of the leadership was abroad.
On 12 July 1941 he took part in the signing of the Soviet-British agreement on joint action in the war against Germany. He held the rank of Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary from 14 June 1943 and took part in the October 1943 Moscow conference of the Soviet, American and British foreign ministers.
Wartime and postwar diplomacy
In 1944 to 1945 he took an active part in negotiations with Romania and then Bulgaria; in February 1945 he was a member of the Soviet delegation at the Yalta Conference, working on one of its commissions, and in April of that year he attended the signing of treaties of friendship and mutual assistance with Poland, Yugoslavia and other states. From 30 May to 6 August 1945 he was concurrently political adviser to Marshal Zhukov, Chief of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany; he brought the text of the Act of Unconditional Surrender of Germany (8 May 1945) to Berlin, providing Zhukov with legal support, and took part in the Potsdam Conference as a member of the Soviet delegation.
Stalin appointed him to the Allied Control Council on Italian affairs, where he began organizing the repatriation of Soviet prisoners of war, including those who did not want to return, and began liaising with the Italian Communist Party in Naples. In February 1945 he accompanied Stalin, Molotov and Beria to Yalta; after returning to Moscow he was dispatched to Romania, where he arranged for a communist regime to assume control in 1945. On 26 February 1946 he rushed to Bucharest while the royal palace was surrounded by Soviet tanks to force King Michael to dismiss the anti-communist head of government, General Nicolae Rădescu, and appoint the pro-communist Petru Groza. He effectively directed the Soviet delegation at the Nuremberg Tribunal, reporting daily to the Politburo, and from 10 November 1945 he headed the permanent commission for open trials of former German military personnel.
Postwar diplomacy and final years
In January 1946 he headed the USSR delegation at the first session of the UN General Assembly, and in the summer and autumn of 1946 he spoke at the plenary sessions of the Paris Peace Conference and in its commissions on political and territorial as well as economic questions (Romania, Hungary, Italy, Trieste, the Balkans and Finland, and the peace treaty with Bulgaria). From March 1946 he was Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs for general questions.
From 1949 to 1953 he was Minister of Foreign Affairs of the USSR, a period that coincided with the Korean War. In March to June 1949 he headed the Committee of Information under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and in 1952 to 1953 he was a member of the Permanent Commission on Foreign Affairs under the Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee. After Stalin's death Molotov again became foreign minister, and Vyshinsky was appointed USSR representative to the UN, serving from 5 March 1953 until his death on 22 November 1954.
Assessments
Some Russian-language assessments characterize his work in legal theory as giving pseudo-scientific legal cover to mass repression and call him the period's chief inquisitor and "Stalin's prosecutor" (Sergei Holovaty), while the academician Vladik Nersesyants called him Stalin's "henchman on the legal front." British diplomat Sir Frank Roberts described him as speaking good French, quick, clever and efficient and always knowing his dossier well, but as giving "the impression of a cringing toadie only too anxious to obey His Master's Voice"; this is presented as Roberts' assessment.