Андрей Вышинский: Советтік саяхатшы, заңгер және дипломат

Soviet politician, jurist and diplomat (1883–1954)

Andrey Yanuaryevich Vyshinsky (Андре́й Януа́рьевич Выши́нский; Andrzej Wyszyński) (10 December 1883 [O. S. 28 November 1883] – 22 November 1954) was a Soviet politician, jurist and diplomat. He is best known as a state prosecutor of Joseph Stalin's Moscow Trials and in the Nuremberg trials. He was the Soviet Foreign Minister from 1949 to 1953, after having served as Deputy Foreign Minister under Vyacheslav Molotov since 1940. He also headed the Institute of State and Law in the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union.

Vyshinsky was born in Odessa into a Polish Catholic family, which later moved to Baku. Early biographies portray his father, Yanuary Vyshinsky (Januarius Wyszyński), as a "well prospering" "experienced inspector" (Russian: Ревизор); while later, undocumented, Stalin era biographies such as that in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia make him a pharmaceutical chemist. A talented student, Andrei Vyshinsky married Kara Mikhailova and became interested in revolutionary ideas. He began attending the Kiev University in 1901, but was expelled in 1902 for participating in revolutionary activities. Vyshinsky returned to Baku, became a member of the Menshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1903 and took an active part in the 1905 Russian Revolution. As a result, in 1908 he was sentenced to prison and a few days later was sent to Баиловская тюрьма in Baku to serve his sentence. Here he first met Stalin: a fellow inmate with whom he engaged in ideological disputes. After his release, he returned home to Baku for the birth of his daughter Zinaida in 1909. Soon thereafter, he returned to Kiev University and did quite well, graduating in 1913. He was even considered for a professorship, but his political past caught up with him, and he was forced to return to Baku. Determined to practise law, he tried Moscow, where he became a successful lawyer, remained an active Menshevik, gave many passionate and incendiary speeches, and became involved in city government.

After the February Revolution in 1917, he was appointed police commissioner of the Yakimanka District. As a minor official, he undersigned an order to arrest Vladimir Lenin on charges of being a "German spy", according to the decision of the Minister of Justice of the Russian Provisional Government, but the October Revolution quickly intervened, and the offices which had ordered the arrest were dissolved. In 1917, he became reacquainted with Stalin, who had become an important Bolshevik leader. Consequently, he joined the staff of the People's Commissariat of Food, which was responsible for Moscow's food supplies, and with the help of Stalin, Alexei Rykov, and Lev Kamenev, he began to rise in influence and prestige. In 1920, after the defeat of the Whites under Denikin, and the end of the Russian Civil War, he joined the Bolsheviks.

Becoming a member of the nomenklatura he became a prosecutor in the new Soviet legal system, began a rivalry with a fellow lawyer, Nikolai Krylenko, and in 1925 was elected rector of Moscow University, which he began to clear of "unsuitable" students and professors. In 1928, he presided over the Shakhty Trial against 53 alleged counter revolutionary "wreckers". Krylenko acted as prosecutor, and the outcome was never in doubt. As historian Arkady Vaksberg explains, "all the court's attention was concentrated not on analyzing the evidence, which simply did not exist, but on securing from the accused confirmation of their confessions of guilt that were contained in the records of the preliminary investigation." In November–December 1930, he presided as judge over the Industrial Party Trial, with Krylenko as prosecutor, which was accompanied by a storm of international protest. In this case, all eight defendants confessed their guilt. As a result, he was promoted. In April 1933, he was prosecutor in the Metro Vickers trial, at which eight out of 18 defendants were British engineers, and which resulted in relatively light sentences. He carried out administrative preparations for a "systematic" drive "against harvest wreckers and grain thieves".

He was responsible for the Soviet preparations for the trial of the major German war criminals by the International Military Tribunal. In 1953, he was among the chief figures accused by the U. S. Congress Kersten Committee during its investigation of the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states. The positions he held included those of vice premier (1939–1944), Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs (1940–1949), Minister of Foreign Affairs (1949–1953), academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union from 1939, and permanent representative of the Soviet Union to the United Nations.

Vyshinsky died on 22 November 1954 in New York City. His body was delivered by a special flight to Moscow and his ashes buried at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.

Vyshinsky was the director of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union's Institute of State and Law. Until the period of de Stalinization, the Institute of State and Law was named in his honor. During his tenure as director of the ISL, Vyshinsky oversaw the publication of several important monographs on the general theory of state and law.

Vyshinsky married Kapitolina Isidorovna Mikhailova and had a daughter named Zinaida Andreyevna Vyshinskaya (born 1909).

The Pet Shop Boys song "This Must Be the Place I Waited Years to Leave" from the album Behaviour (1990) contains a sample of recording from Vyshinsky's speech at the Zinoviev Kamenev trial of 1936. Vyshinsky appears at the beginning of the 2016 novel A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles as the prosecutor in a purported transcript of an appearance by Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, the novel's gentleman protagonist, before the Emergency Committee of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs on 21 June 1922. In Gregor Martov's alternative history novel His New Majesty, depicting an alternate history in which Anton Denikin's White forces defeated the Bolsheviks in 1921, Vyshinsky joins the winners and acts as the royal prosecutor in a show trial in which Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky and Bukharin are sentenced to death as "Subversives, Traitors, Blasphemers and Regicides". He is rewarded in being ennobled by the restored czar and made a duke, but gets assassinated by an anarchist girl with whom he had a secret affair. The saying "give me the man; there'll be a paragraph for him", popular in Poland and referring to the miscarriage of justice under the communist regimes, has been attributed to him.