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Vyshinsky was born on December 12, 1883 in Odessa into a Polish Catholic family, who later moved to Baku. His father, Yanuarii Vyshinsky (January Wyszyński), as his earlier biographies state, was a "well-prospering" "experienced inspector", while his later, undocumented Stalin-era biographies such as "The Great Soviet Encyclopedia" make him a pharmaceutical chemist.
A talented student, he became interested in revolutionary ideas. He began attending the Kiev University but was expelled for participating in revolutionary activities.
Throughout World War I and the October Revolution he worked in the Ukraine and elsewhere as a political activist, lecturing and writing, and working for a time in the food distribution apparatus. According to one account, he volunteered for the Red Army and served in 1919 and 1920.
Vyshinsky joined the Bolshevik Party only at the end of the civil war in 1920. Whether his Menshevik past affected the strength of his new commitment to Bolshevism is difficult to tell, but he soon became a strident partisan and an ardent supporter of Stalin. In the 1920s he lectured, served as a prosecuting attorney, and held several important educational posts, including the deanship of the Plekhanov Economic Institute (1923-1925) and the post of rector (chancellor) of Moscow State University (1925-1928). His metier, however, was the courtroom. In 1928 Stalin chose Vyshinsky to head a special office attached to the U. S. S. R. supreme court to investigate and prosecute "wrecking" (disloyalties to the state), and he soon became famous as the state's attorney in the first of Stalin's notorious show trials.
Thereafter, Vyshinsky was constantly in the public eye. Writing and lecturing about the principles of socialist legality, and author of the leading Soviet textbook on criminal law, he revealed in practice that Stalinist law meant whatever the prosecutor's office said it meant. Between 1935 and 1939 prosecutor Vyshinsky took each of Stalin's leading victims to the dock, haranguing Nikoli Bukharin and Aleksei Rykov, castigating Sergei Kamenev and Gregori Zinoviev, attacking the old Bolshevik cadre as traitors and "swine. " Compulsion and torture became the instruments of investigation and prosecution; false confessions the symbol of the prosecutor's "success. " Even those inclined at first to believe in the trials, like the American ambassador Joseph Davies, found Vyshinsky's conduct appalling and demonic.
Had Stalin been consistent in these matters, Vyshinsky himself would have followed NKVD police chiefs Yezhov and Yagoda into prison along with the other leading purgers, but Stalin spared his slavish prosecutor, preferring instead to apply his talents to foreign affairs. In 1940 Vyshinsky became deputy foreign minister, a post which brought him in close contact with Western leaders during World War II, and from 1949 until Stalin's death in 1953 he headed the foreign ministry. In this capacity he represented the U. S. S. R. on various Allied commissions. In 1945 he signed the document of German surrender on behalf of his government. He also led the Soviet delegation to peace talks in Paris and to the initial United Nations meeting in New York, where his oratorical skills helped secure an "independent" status in the UN for the Soviet republics Ukraine and Belorussia.
From 1947 until 1953 Foreign Minister Vyshinsky headed the Soviet UN delegation, and he resumed his post in New York after Stalin's death despite being stripped of his ministerial position. The old Menshevik had, by this time, become an old Stalinist. He must have known when he died that his usefulness to Stalin's successors was limited, but his personal insecurities, if any, remained hidden, as always, behind a constant stream of angry bluster. His ashes are buried in the Kremlin wall.
Andrei Vyshinsky became one of the Soviet Union's best known political figures in the early 1950s when he served as head of the Soviet mission to the United Nations (UN).
Vyshinsky was the director of the Soviet Academy of Sciences' Institute of State and Law. Until the period of destalinization, 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.
He was a Full Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
A master of inflamatory rhetoric, combative, scornful, and ready in an instant to heap the most undiplomatic abuse on other UN spokesmen, Vyshinsky drew wide attention, none of it favorable.
Quotes from others about the person
At his death a few weeks before his 71st birthday on November 22, 1954, the New York Times called him a "master of the vitriolic word. "
Vyshinsky married Kara Mikhailova and had a daughter named Zinaida Andreyevna Vyshinskaya (born 1909).
(born 1909)
Minister of Foreign Affairs
