RUSSIA: Devil’s Advocate

In Hollywood’s version of Mission to Moscow, the purge trial prosecutor has a black beard, black, beetling eyebrows and a wolfish snarl. When the film got a private screening in the Kremlin in 1943, the real prosecutor at those strange and gloomy assizes, a clean-shaven man with white hair and a pink face, almost collapsed with laughter—laughter directed not only against the movie but against the popular cliche of that day that a Russian Bolshevik was a man with a black beard and a bomb in his hand. If, twelve years later, the popular conception of a latter-day Bolshevik is nearer reality, it is due in some measure to that same pink-faced, white-haired prosecutor, Andrei Vishinsky. Before he suddenly died in the headquarters of the Soviet U.N. delegation on Manhattan’s Park Avenue last week, Vishinsky had succeeded in putting a new face on Russian Communism, a vastly more sinister, clever and threatening face than Hollywood had imagined.

In the official Soviet Encyclopedia, Vishinsky’s past is prettily arranged for posterity. He appears as a revolutionary almost from childhood, a man persecuted by regimes hostile to progress, a brilliant and prolific author of legal works, a pillar of probity in the Soviet state. But then, of course, Vishinsky, once editor of the Soviet Encyclopedia, was able to rewrite history.

Dancing Dandy. The facts are that his family was connected with the Polish nobility, and his father was a well-to-do pharmacist in Baku. Andrei Yanuarevich, as he was called, was a spoiled young dandy who liked to dance, dress well, and take full advantage of his middle-class social position. He wanted to be a lawyer, but at Kiev University in those turbulent years at the turn of the century, a student had to make a political choice, or forego ambition. Figuring that the Czars were about washed up, Andrei chose the Menshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party. In the abortive 1905 revolution, Vishinsky was arrested along with a bunch of railroad strikers and did time in a Czarist prison.

When the Bolsheviks made their coup d’état and set up their Marxist-Leninist dictatorship in 1917, Vishinsky was running a Menshevik soup kitchen in the Zamoskvoretsky district. For three tough years, little was heard of Andrei Yanuarevich. Then in 1920 the civil war ended, and he was admitted to the triumphant Russian Communist Party. It was a switch many thousands of people in the professional classes, facing starvation or physical liquidation, made at that time. But it set him apart from the old Bolsheviks; he was for a long time suspect.

Wagging Tail. A Russian proverb says that if you run with the pack, it is necessary not only to bark but to wag your tail. Andrei Yanuarevich set out to be a tailwagger extraordinary. Tirelessly he lectured and wrote about the “magnificent and profoundly true words” of contemporary Bolshevik leaders. A functionary in the Moscow Law School (though the record later dignified his jobs with grandiose titles), he was detested by the Old Bolshevik jurists. “I cannot stomach him,” said Appellate Judge Galkin. “That man is simply a disgusting careerist.” In the university he got to know a plump young party worker named Georgy Malenkov. Soon Andrei was made presiding judge at a trial of engineers charged with sabotaging Ukrainian coal mines. He helped work out the Soviet trial technique which he later, as State Prosecutor, employed with success against a group of British engineers on contract to the Soviet government, who were accused of spying. “So far as this country is concerned,” Vishinsky told the Britons (some of whom surprised the world by confessing their guilt), “your only use would be to manure the soil of our Soviet fields.”

It was the kind of bark that Joseph Stalin, at that time in the middle of his struggle for power, liked. Three years later Vishinsky was State Prosecutor in a series of trials of former Bolsheviks charged with treason, terrorism and various crimes against the state (i.e., ‘Stalin). The technique of confession was now brought to its highest point. Revolutionaries of the toughest fiber yielded easily to Vishinsky’s interrogation. “You son of a pig and a bull,” he shouted at Bolshevik Theorist Bukharin. In his summing up, he cried: “Crush the accursed vipers . . . foul dogs . . . disgusting villains! We cannot leave such people alive!”

The trials were the legal facade for a vast purge in which half a million Russians are believed to have been shot and another 7,000,000 sent to slave camps. Britain’s Laborite Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin said later: “I cannot look him in the face without expecting at any moment to see that cruel mouth begin to drip with the blood of his thousands of victims.”

Vishinsky’s next job was to erect a huge edifice of legal theory rationalizing and justifying the absolute sovereignty of the Stalinist state. An innocent world has been inclined to give him high marks as a jurist, but Vishinsky himself, as he was able to do, once summed up the whole of this effort: “I do not believe in abstract justice.”

Flowing Venom. In 1950, when Russia occupied the three Baltic states and then staged a dummy plebiscite to legitimize their absorption into the U.S.S.R., Vishinsky masterminded the Latvian deal and became Vice Commissar for Foreign Affairs. During the war he sat in on the allied conferences at Moscow and later at Yalta, where Roosevelt asked him if he had ever been abroad. Vishinsky replied: “Not often. And the first time I left Russia, a funny thing happened. I went to Latvia. One morning there I woke up—and I was back in Russia.” At war’s end, he organized Rumania into the Soviet orbit. He was asked how many votes the Communists would get in a free election. Perhaps 45%, he answered casually, then, squeezing his fist, added: “With leetle pressure, 90%.”

In 1946 Stalin sent him to the first session of the United Nations General As sembly at London. There, and in Manhattan later, he set the harsh debating tone of the cold war, with an unceasing flow of venomous invective directed at the U.S., its “warmongers . . . professional liars and falsifiers.”

As a villain, he became the U.N.’s No. 1 crowd-puller. He brought a kind of energy to the staid U.N. and many delegates liked to cross swords with him, watch him flail the table with his fists, see the top of his head go pink with anger. Some diplomats had a certain sympathy for him, but Vishinsky never allowed sympathy to break through his guard, constantly embarrassed hosts and guests with personal attacks. “Lots of venal people dislike their work,” said Britain’s Soviet Specialist Edward Crankshaw. “Vishinsky was venal but happy.” In the strange and somber matrix of murder, assassination, conspiracy and intrigue that has been Soviet official life in the last 30 years, Vishinsky, a man of non-proletarian origin and a onetime dissenter, not only survived, but built a brilliant career for himself.

After his death (from coronary thrombosis) was announced, his body was embalmed, put briefly on view at Russia’s Park Avenue headquarters, and then flown to Moscow. There he was cremated and the urn containing his ashes was exhibited in the Hall of Columns. Later, with great pomp and panoply, it was carried to Red Square and placed in a niche in the Kremlin wall. He had died wanting 18 days to his 71st birthday, but no one, neither his U.N. colleagues nor his fellow careerists in Moscow, in eulogizing him, suggested that he had died too soon.