30 Facts About Andrey Vyshinsky

Andrey Vyshinsky is best known as a state prosecutor of Joseph Stalin's Moscow Trials and in the Nuremberg trials.

Andrey Vyshinsky was the Soviet Foreign Minister from 1949 to 1953, after having served as Deputy Foreign Minister under Vyacheslav Molotov since 1940.

Andrey Vyshinsky headed the Institute of State and Law in the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union.

Andrey Vyshinsky began attending the Kiev University in 1901, but was expelled in 1902 for participating in revolutionary activities.

Andrey 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.

Andrey Vyshinsky was even considered for a professorship, but his political past caught up with him, and he was forced to return to Baku.

Andrey Vyshinsky carried out administrative preparations for a "systematic" drive "against harvest-wreckers and grain-thieves".

Andrey Vyshinsky was appointed First Deputy Procurator General of the Soviet Union when the office was first created on 30 June 1933.

In June 1935, Andrey Vyshinsky replaced Akulov, who had allegedly questioned the decision to link Zinoviev and others to the Kirov murder, and from thereon he was the legal mastermind of Joseph Stalin's Great Purge.

Andrey Vyshinsky used his own speeches from the Moscow Trials as an example of how defendants' statements could be used as primary evidence.

Andrey Vyshinsky is cited for the principle that "confession of the accused is the queen of evidence".

Andrey Vyshinsky first became a nationally known public figure as a result of the Semenchuk case of 1936.

Andrey Vyshinsky was accused of oppressing and starving the local Yupik and of ordering his subordinate, the sledge driver Stepan Startsev, to murder Dr Nikolai Vulfson, who had attempted to stand up to Semenchuk, on 27 December 1934.

In 1936, Andrey Vyshinsky achieved international infamy as the prosecutor at the Zinoviev-Kamenev trial, the first of the Moscow Trials during the Great Purge, lashing its defenseless victims with vituperative rhetoric:.

In May 1939, Andrey Vyshinsky was promoted to the rank of Deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars Ministers of the Soviet Union.

Andrey Vyshinsky's speech was not reported in the Soviet press, except to say that it was severely criticised.

In June 1937, Vyshinsky took part in negotiations with the US Ambassador in Moscow, Joseph E Davies, over trade debts, and after the completion of the last of the major show trials, in March 1938, he entered another phase in his career, devoted primarily to foreign affairs.

Andrey Vyshinsky had a low opinion of diplomats because they often complained about the effect of trials on opinions in the West.

In 1939, Andrey Vyshinsky introduced a motion to the Supreme Soviet to bring the Western Ukraine into the USSR.

Andrey Vyshinsky was generally well received, and he set out to purge the Latvian Communist Party of Trotskyists, Bukharinites, and possible foreign agents.

Andrey Vyshinsky remained here for much of the war, but he continued to act as a loyal functionary, and attempted to ingratiate himself with Archibald Clark Kerr and visiting Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie.

Andrey Vyshinsky began to liaise with the Italian Communist Party in Naples.

Andrey Vyshinsky spoke good French, was quick, clever and efficient, and always knew his dossier well, but whereas I had a certain unwilling respect for Molotov, I had none at all for Vyshinsky.

Andrey Vyshinsky was responsible for the Soviet preparations for the trial of the major German war criminals by the International Military Tribunal.

Andrey Vyshinsky died on 22 November 1954 in New York City.

Andrey Vyshinsky's body was returned to Moscow by a special flight, and his ashes buried at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.

Andrey Vyshinsky was the director of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union's Institute of State and Law.

Andrey 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, Andrey 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".

Andrey Vyshinsky 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.