Vyshinsky, Andrei Yanuarievich

(1883–1954)

   Vyshinsky, a Menshevik in his youth, served a sentence for political radicalism with Joseph Stalin in 1907–1908. He apparently befriended Stalin, feeding him from food packages he received from his wealthy parents. In the late 1920s Vyshinsky entered the procuracy and was the lead prosecutor in the three Moscow Trials. Vyshinsky gained an international reputation from his rhetoric: he demanded in all three trials that the defendants, “these mad dogs,” be shot. He was made procurator general of the country in 1938 and sat on three-person special courts that sent thousands of men and women to their death. Beginning in 1939, Stalin used Vyshinsky in diplomatic missions to the Baltic and Eastern Europe, promoting him to deputy foreign minister. Over the next five years, he was Stalin’s enforcer, shaping governments, crafting agreements, and ordering the arrests of real and suspected enemies. In May 1945 Stalin sent Vyshinsky to Berlin to act as Marshal Georgi Zhukov’s “political advisor.” Vyshinsky later served at the Nuremberg trials as an advisor to the Soviet judges and prosecutors. He was rewarded by Stalin for his work on the court and in Eastern Europe by promotion to minister of foreign affairs and to chief of the Komitet Informatsii (Committee of Information). He died in 1954 of a heart attack.

   Vyshinsky was one of Stalin’s most successful and long-standing servants. A cultured man from a family of Polish aristocrats with a prerevolutionary legal education, he became the public face of Stalin’s justice to Soviet citizens and the world. The Soviet archives show that his speeches at the Moscow Trials were edited and rewritten by Stalin. Yet he apparently lived with dread that the wheels of history could crush him, as they had many of his victims. Vyshinsky, according to longtime foreign minister Anatoly Gromyko, lived in fear of Lavrenty Beria. When Beria called, Vyshinsky sprang to attention. Vyshinsky, Gromyko claimed, “cringed like a dog before his master.”