Stalin’s Prosecutor, The Life of Andrei Vyshinsky

Andrei Vyshinsky rose to fame as the chief prosecutor during many of the infamous show trials of the late 1930’s in the Soviet Union.  A brilliant student, lawyer and lover of academia, he was a second level (never entering Stalin’s inner circle) bureaucrat who managed to use the deaths of those he prosecuted to advance his career.  Although the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union at the time, Joseph E. Davies felt that the trials were conducted to the highest legal standards (his book, Mission to Moscow was made into a terrible propaganda movie in 1943) they could only be viewed in that manner if you wondered why defendants who recanted were taken from the court room and then their written statements reversing their recanted statements were admitted and they were convicted (many who recanted were so badly beaten that they could not be taken into the public eye and were quickly executed).  As a side note, Ambassador Davies spent most his time antique hunting and sent hundreds of “finds” back to his home in the U.S.

Aside from the show trials, Vyshinsky served as the front man for the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states in 1939 but his power was illusional.  He was promoted to several academic posts (he was considered by many to be quite charming and well educated) and then to the U.N. as head of the Soviet delegation.  In that position, he treated other ambassador’s during debates as he treated his former defendants, subjecting them to verbal language that had not been heard previously nor since in those chambers.  He followed the line of Stalin through every twist and turn managing to survive a long career as an example of a Soviet apparatchik in its finest form.

An interesting book if one can follow the usual Russian style of writing which at times can seem to wander, going off on tangents and then suddenly reversing course back to the main point.  It is not as difficult to read as Solzhenitsyn’s style, but it can take concentration.  A good book for anyone hoping to catch a glimpse at survival of a bureaucrat in the Soviet Union.