Andrey Vyshinsky

Andrey Januaryevich Vyshinskiy ( _ru. Андре́й Януа́рьевич Выши́нский, "Andrej Januar'evič Vyšinskij") (OldStyleDate|December 10|1883|November 28, Odessa –November 22, 1954, New York), was a Russian and Soviet jurist and diplomat. He is mostly known as a state prosecutor of Stalin's show trials. He served as the Soviet Foreign Minister from 1949 to 1953. Vyshinsky was of Polish descent and spoke some English and excellent French.

He became a Menshevik in 1903 and in 1917 he undersigned an order to arrest Lenin according the decision of the Russian Provisional Government. [ [http://www.hrono.ru/biograf/vyshinski.html С весны 1917 работал в наркомтруде и прокуратуре, летом 1917 подписал ордер на арест В.Ленина,...] (In spring 1917 worked in Narkomtrude and Prokuratura, summer 1917 signed the order to arrest V. Lenin,...)] . In 1920, he joined the Bolsheviks.

In 1935 he became Prosecutor General of the USSR, the legal mastermind of Joseph Stalin's Great Purge. He put a theoretical legal base under the treason trials. One of the principles of Vyshinsky's theory was that criminal law is a tool of the class struggle.

His monograph that justifies this postulate, "Theory of Judicial Proofs in Soviet Justice", was awarded the Stalin Prize in 1947. He is widely cited for the principle that "confession of the accused is the queen of evidence".

He was the prosecutor at the major show trials of the Great Purge, lashing its defenseless victims with vituperative, sometimes cruelly witty rhetoric:Nicolas Werth, Karel Bartošek, Jean-Louis Panné, Jean-Louis Margolin, Andrzej Paczkowski, Stéphane Courtois, "The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression", Harvard University Press, 1999, ISBN 0-674-07608-7, page 750]

In June, 1940, Vyshinskiy was sent to the Republic of Latvia [cite web |url=http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/nsr/nsr-05.html#14 |title=Analytical list of documents, V. Friction in the Baltic States and Balkans, June 4-September 21, 1940
accessdate=2007-03-03 |format=html |work= Telegram of German Ambassador in the Soviet Union (Schulenburg) to the German Foreign Office ] to supervise establishment of puppet government and incorporation of country into USSR, and later arranged for a communist regime to assume control of Romania in 1945. [cite encyclopedia | year = 2007 | title = Vyshinsky, Andrey | encyclopedia = Encyclopædia Britannica | accessdate = 2007-03-03 | edition = Britannica Concise Encyclopedia | url = http://concise.britannica.com/ebc/article-9075802/Andrey-Yanuaryevich-Vyshinsky's ] Lately he was between the main accused names of the U.S. Congress Kersten Committee in 1953 [ [http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,806766,00.html The Iron Heel] , "TIME Magazine", December 14, 1953]

He was responsible for the Soviet preparations for the trial of the major war criminals by the International Military Tribunal.

The positions he held include those of vice-premier (1939–1944), deputy Commissar for Foreign Affairs (1940–1949), Minister for Foreign Affairs (1949-1953), Academician of the Soviet Academy of Sciences from 1939, and permanent representative of the Soviet Union to the United Nations.

He died while in New York and was buried near the Red Square.

References

External links

* [http://art-bin.com/art/omosc22m.html Vyshinsky speech at the 1936 trial of Zinoviev and Kamenev]
* [http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/hiss/hissvenona.html Venona transcript #1822]