Andrey Vyshinsky

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Andrey Vyshinsky

Andrey Januaryevich Vyshinskiy (Russian: Андре́й Януа́рьевич Выши́нский, Andrej Januar'evič Vyšinskij) (December 10 [O.S. November 28] 1883–November 22, 1954), also spelt Vishinsky, Vyshinskii, was a Russian and Soviet jurist and later diplomat. 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 joined the Bolsheviks in 1920. In 1917 he undersigned an order to arrest Lenin according the decision of the Russian Provisional Government.

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 (Теория судебных доказательств в советской юстиции), was awarded the Stalin Prize in 1947.

Contrary to the wide-spread rumor that he justified the principle that "confession is the queen of evidence", he in fact explicitly stated in his work that it could not be applied in Soviet justice.

He presided at the major show trials of the Great Purge, lashing its defenseless victims with vituperative, sometimes cruelly witty rhetoric.

In June, 1940, Vyshinskiy was sent to Soviet occupied Latvia^[1] 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.^[2]

He also played a significant role in the Nuremberg Trials.

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 in New York and was buried in Red Square.

[edit] References

^ Analytical list of documents, V. Friction in the Baltic States and Balkans, June 4-September 21, 1940 (html). Telegram of German Ambassador in the Soviet Union (Schulenburg) to the German Foreign Office. Retrieved on 2007-03-03.
^ "Vyshinsky, Andrey". Encyclopædia Britannica (Britannica Concise Encyclopedia). (2007). Retrieved on March 3, 2007.