Andrei Januaryevich Wyschinsky

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Andrei Wyschinski (1940)

Andrey Vyshinsky ( Russian Андрей Януарьевич Вышинский , Polish Andrzej Wyszynski , English Andrey Vyshinsky * November 28 . Jul / 10. December  1883 greg. In Odessa ; † 22. November 1954 in New York , NY ) was a Soviet lawyer who from 1935 to 1939 the office of the General Prosecutor of the Soviet Union and from 1949 to 1953 of the Soviet Foreign Minister .

Life

Andrei Wyschinski was the son of a high tsarist official of Polish Catholic origin. In 1903 he joined the Mensheviks of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party . Until 1913 he studied at the Kiev University Law , after that he was there as a research assistant and doctoral candidate set, but the city at the direction of had because of his political views Tsarist police leave.

After the February Revolution of 1917, he held the post of head of the militia of the Moscow district of Samoskvorechye for a few months . In this capacity, he countersigned the arrest warrant for Lenin and Grigory Zinoviev , which was issued by the Kerensky government. Only in 1920 did Vyshinsky join the Communist Party . He quickly won the trust of Stalin , which he had met in prison during the Tsarist days , and made a career as a lecturer and legal theorist.

He was a public prosecutor at the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union from 1923 to 1925 , but then switched to science. From 1925 to 1928 he was rector of Moscow State University , a significant post within the Soviet higher education system, then from 1928 to 1931 a member of the College of the People's Commissariat for Education . In 1928 he had served as a judge in the Shakhty trial . From 1931 to 1933 he was prosecutor of the RSFSR and deputy people's commissar of the judiciary of the RSFSR, then from 1933 deputy prosecutor of the Soviet Union. In 1934 he was one of the heads of the public prosecutor's investigation into the assassination of the Leningrad party leader Sergei Kirov . Through torture, the investigation produced the result Stalin wanted.

From 1935 to 1939 Vyshinsky was Attorney General of the Soviet Union. In close consultation with Stalin, he drafted the scripts for the show trials , whereby the accused were usually brought to their testimony and the desired confessions through severe torture. He often yelled at the defendants during his performances and used vulgar swearwords for them. Vyshinsky was occasionally in the execution of it asks to death sentences in person, such as the NKVD - executioner Vasili Blokhin Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky with shot in the neck killed. During this period and later, while serving as the head of the legal institute of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (from 1937 to 1941), he advocated the principle that all law is an expression of the will of the ruling class . In his view, the defendants' confessions were sufficient to document their guilt; they are the most important pieces of evidence. In 2018, Novaya Gazeta wrote that he was the first public prosecutor to show that "one can do without evidence at all". At the same time, he was brilliantly responsible for Stalin in creating the appearance of full legality of state actions.

In 1939 he became a member of the Central Committee and deputy chairman of the Council of People's Commissars , and from 1940 at the same time the First Deputy of the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs (Foreign Minister) Vyacheslav Molotov . In June 1940 he was sent to Latvia as the representative of the Soviet government , which was subsequently annexed by the Soviet Union following fraudulent elections.

Wyschinski next to Marshal Zhukov at the signing of the German document of surrender in Berlin-Karlshorst

Immediately after the end of the war, Vyshinsky was commissioned to draft the script for the Moscow Trial of the Sixteen , accused were Polish politicians and senior military officials who opposed the Sovietization of their homeland. He then headed the government commission that prepared the Soviet delegation of lawyers for the Nuremberg trials behind the scenes . This included the preparation of alleged witnesses to the Katyn massacre , who were supposed to confirm that it was a German crime.

On March 4, 1949, he took over the post of Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union, succeeding Molotov. After Stalin's death in 1953, Molotov ousted him from this post again and deported him as ambassador to the United Nations in New York . In New York he became famous for his passionate advocacy of the very position that his superiors had commanded at the moment. His appearance at the beginning of the Cold War was more aimed at using the UN as a platform for confrontation - on which Vyshinsky, in the words of Novaya Gazeta, “trampled foreign diplomats” - than at taking up its own claim to the possibility of finding compromises.

Vyshinsky died in New York in 1954. His urn was buried on the Kremlin wall in Moscow. The Russian émigré newspaper Russkaya Mysl , published in Paris, reported, citing sources in the CIA , that Vyshinsky had been poisoned by an agent who had traveled from Moscow and that he had become a victim of the power struggle after Stalin's death. The Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation stated on its website in 2014 that he had committed suicide.

He was the author of almost 200 publications, had been a member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR since 1939 and was awarded the Order of Lenin four times . His work The Theory of Court Evidence in Soviet Law , which theoretically justifies political repression, was awarded the First Class Stalin Prize in 1947 .

reception

His speeches during the Moscow show trials from 1936 to 1938 served as a basis for discussion and training material in the early years of the GDR . According to Justice Minister Hilde Benjamin in 1952, they would convey “not only fundamental knowledge of the theory of the state and law, but also of state and legal practice”. The GDR Code of Criminal Procedure was developed against this background. On November 27, 1954, the work of Vyshinski in the Ministry of Justice was expressly recognized in a commemoration ceremony of the Association of Democratic Jurists.

In an overview of his life's work, the Novaya Gazeta wrote that positions in the highest offices would have suited his talents, but perhaps at other times innate meanness, cowardice and lack of principles would have been less in demand. Dean Acheson , United States Secretary of State from 1949 to 1953 , said of Vyshinsky: "A born villain, though amusing."

Works

  • Course ugolovnogo procesa (German textbook of criminal process). Moscow 1927.
  • Sudoustrojstvo v SSSR (German court structures in the USSR). Moscow, 1939.
  • Teorija sudebnych dokazatel'stv v sovetskom prave (German The theory of evidence at the court in Soviet law). Moscow, 1941.
  • Voprosy teorii gosudarstva i prava (German The questions of state and legal theory). Moscow, 1949.
  • Voprosy meždunarodnogo prava i meždunarodnoj politiki (German questions of international law and international politics). Moscow, 1949.
  • Court speeches, Berlin 1952

literature

Web links

Commons : Andrei Wyschinski  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Arkadi Waksberg : The persecuted of Stalin. From the KGB dungeons. Reinbek 1993, p. 138.
  2. ↑ Arkadi Waksberg: Merciless. Andrei Vyshinsky - murderer in the service of Stalin. Bergisch Gladbach 1991, pp. 218-308.
  3. ↑ Nikita Vasilyevich Petrov : Палачи они выполняли заказы Сталина. Novaya Gazeta, Moscow 2011, ISBN 978-5-91147-018-0 , p. 198.
  4. ↑ a b c d Леонид Млечин (Leonid Mletschin): "Ничтожны предложения, идущие из атлантического лагеря!" In: Novaya Gazeta . September 7, 2018, accessed on May 15, 2020 (Russian, "The proposals from the Atlantic camp are worthless!").
  5. ↑ Nikita Vasilyevich Petrov : Палачи они выполняли заказы Сталина. Novaya Gazeta, Moscow 2011, ISBN 978-5-91147-018-0 , p. 132.
  6. ↑ Thomas Urban : Katyn 1940. History of a crime. CH Beck, Munich, 2015, ISBN 978-3-406-67366-5 , pp. 158–159.
  7. ↑ Yuri Felshtinsky : Вожди в законе. Moscow, 2008, p. 354 , accessed on May 15, 2020 (Russian).
  8. ↑ История в лицах: Андрей Януарьевич Вышинский. Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation, archived from the original on August 8, 2014 ; accessed on May 15, 2020 (Russian).
  9. ↑ Wladislaw Hedeler : The scenarios of the Moscow show trials 1936 to 1938. (pdf; 91 kB) In: Utopie Kreativ . Issue 81/82, July 1997, pp. 58–75, here p. 59 , accessed on May 15, 2020 .
predecessor Office successor
Vyacheslav Molotov Soviet Foreign Minister
1949–1953 		Vyacheslav Molotov
personal data
SURNAME Wyschinski, Andrei Januarjewitsch
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Вышинский, Андрей Януарьевич (Russian spelling)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Soviet politician and foreign minister
DATE OF BIRTH December 10, 1883
PLACE OF BIRTH Odessa
DATE OF DEATH November 22, 1954
Place of death New York City , USA