Andrey Vyshinsky

Andrey Vyshinsky was a Soviet legal official and diplomat, born in Odessa in the Russian Empire on December 10, 1883, and died on November 22, 1954, who served as Procurator General of the Soviet Union from 1935 to 1939, during which he acted as chief state prosecutor in Stalin's Moscow Trials, and later as Soviet foreign minister from 1949 to 1953 and permanent representative to the United Nations. His legal treatise, The Theory of Judicial Proofs in Soviet Law, which won the Stalin Prize in 1947, supplied the theoretical justification for the confession based prosecutions of the Moscow Trials, developing the doctrine that a defendant's own confession, rather than independent physical or documentary evidence, could stand as the strongest form of proof available to a Soviet court, a position later summarized as treating confession as the queen of evidence. As director of the Institute of State and Law at the Academy of Sciences, Vyshinsky shaped how Soviet legal theory justified subordinating court procedure to the political objectives of the state, a model of prosecution built around extracted confessions rather than contested evidence. His legal doctrine and courtroom conduct during the Moscow Trials were cited internationally as a case study in the abuse of legal process, a legacy that surfaced again in international discussions of legal procedure and evidence at the Nuremberg trials after the war.