Soviet Union
Soviet communism
1883–1954
○ Natural causes
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.
In court, he rejected the authorities’ division of the workers into ‘hooligans’ and argued that state violence had helped create the conditions for the explosion.
Stanisław Hejmowski was a Polish lawyer who defended political defendants and vulnerable people in the postwar years. After the 1956 Poznań workers’ uprising, he represented participants and argued that the cases had to be understood not as ordinary crime but as a social conflict produced by state policy and security-force violence. His advocacy challenged coerced investigations and the authorities’ portrayal of workers as hooligans, defending their dignity and legal rights. He was later punished through surveillance, a press campaign, a heavy fine, and suspension from legal practice.
Career timeline
1900Born in Libau, Courland
1924Graduated in law from the University of Warsaw
1928–1930Worked as a prosecutor in Poznań, then entered the bar
1946Defended Arthur Greiser before the Supreme National Tribunal
1956Defended Poznań June participants Jerzy Sroka and Roman Bulczyński
1959Became a major target of Polish security-service surveillance
1961Was suspended from practice and subjected to financial repression
A legal functionary who defined order against a workers’ revolt
On 17 July 1956, he said the investigation would distinguish striking workers from “trouble-makers, criminals and provocateurs.”
Marian Rybicki was a Polish lawyer and communist politician who helped institutionalize the postwar state through senior party, legal, and administrative work. After the Poznań workers’ revolt in 1956, as Prosecutor General, he publicly advanced a “two currents” line distinguishing striking workers from “trouble-makers, criminals and provocateurs.” The distinction separated workers’ economic grievances from alleged criminal responsibility, but it also framed the investigations and trials that followed. He later served as justice minister and worked as a legal scholar concerned with law and governance in a socialist state.
Career timeline
1937Graduated in law from the University of Warsaw
1945–1947Worked in the Legal Department of the Presidium of the National National Council
1947–1948Served on the Executive Committee and Secretariat of the Polish Socialist Party
1948–1954Member of the Organizational Bureau of the Polish United Workers’ Party Central Committee
1952–1956First Secretary of the Council of State
1956–1957Prosecutor General of the Polish People’s Republic
1957–1965Minister of Justice
1965–1983Professor at the Polish Academy of Sciences’ Institute of State and Law, and secretary of the All-Poland Committee of the Front of National Unity
