Andrey Vyshinsky

Statesman. 

Chief Prosecutor and Foreign Minister of Soviet Union. He performed a leading role in Show Trials, where old Bolshevik leaders were staged guilty and shot by strict orders of Stalin.

Background
Lived: 1883-1954.
Andrey Vyshinsky was born in Odessa. He studied law at the university and became a public prosecutor.

Andrey Vyshinsky became a Menshevik in 1903. He had once, as a minor officer, by orders of the Provisional Government, signed an arrest decree of Vladimir Lenin. This fact was effectively used later by Stalin to manipulate him.

Career
After the October Revolution, Vyshinsky joined the Bolsheviks and began teaching law at the Moscow State University. By 1935 Vyshinsky was a chief prosecutor of the Soviet Union.

Purge Trials
Stalin entrusted him the conducting of his infamous Show Trials. Stalin was determined to bring his old rivals Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and Rykov to the court and have them tried and executed. The defendants signed absurd confessions by Stalin’s promise that he would guarantee them life. Stalin lied and they were all shot. All of the speeches including Vyshinsky’s were edited personally by Stalin.

Vyshinsky took the initiative and finished one of his speeches screaming: “Shoot these rabid dogs! Let’s put an end once and for all to these miserable hybrids of foxes and pigs, these stinking corpses!”

Diplomat
Vyshinsky served as deputy foreign minister and conducted the sovietization of Latvia and Romania in 1940. When Molotov fell out of favour with Stalin, Andrey Vyshinsky was appointed Foreign Minister (1949-53). He later served as a representative to the United Nations until his death.

Vyshinsky died in New York in 1954.