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Spoonfuls of Menshevism. The February (democratic) revolution of 1917 gave Vishinsky his chance; he became chief of a Moscow administrative district. But he was still in the wrong camp. He treated random visitors to his office with free soup for an ideological purpose: "In order to pour some Menshevism into them with each spoonful."
By 1920, however, it was clear to Vishinsky that Menshevism would take more than free soup. He applied for membership in the Communist Party. He was admitted. Since then his career has been extraordinary. Never once has he been found guilty of a major deviation from "the line"; mostly he has shown a surprising ability to anticipate it. He buttressed his conversion with a vehement book, Studies in the History of Communism, which avoided the more touchy doctrinal issues but trumpeted Vishinsky's Communist convictions.
But despite his zeal, Vishinsky was a comparatively small party potato, until Stalin, having liquidated his former public prosecutor, looked around for a man brash enough to take his place. He lit on Comrade Vishinsky.
The purge trials of 1936-38 gave Prosecutor Vishinsky full scope for his revolutionary ardor, his legal experience and a highly theatrical courtroom manner. Sometimes he was sarcastically solicitous. After grilling Old Bolshevik Georgy Pyatakov (former assistant Commissar of Heavy Industry) for hours, Vishinsky asked with his sharklike smile: "Accused Pyatakov, perhaps you are tired?" Sometimes he was bland, as with Old Bolshevik Karl Radek (former editor of Izvestia, former bureau chief in the Moscow Foreign Office). Vishinsky: "Were your actions conscious?" Radek: "Never in my life have I performed unconscious actions, except in my sleep." Vishinsky: "And this was, unfortunately, not in your sleep?" Radek: "This, unfortunately, was not in sleep."
"Russia Is Not America!" But sometimes Vishinsky dropped his bland manner and gave his victims a foretaste of what he gave to U.N. last week. Cried he at the end of the 1938 trials: "Let your sentence, Comrade Judges, resound as a bell calling for new victories. Crush the accursed vipers . . . foul dogs . . . disgusting villains! We cannot leave such people alive. . . . They can do such things in America—where Al Capone remains alive—but not here. . . . Thank God, Russia is not America!"
One minor matter was attended to after the purges. In the first edition of the Soviet Encyclopedia, Vishinsky had been identified as a former Menshevik. The trials accounted for most of the Encyclopedia's editors. Thereafter, a thoroughly purged edition appeared in which the only mention whatever of Andrei Vishinsky was the listing of his name among the new editors.
Since 1940, Vishinsky has been chief diplomatic assistant to Old Bolshevik Vyacheslav Molotov. His first assignment abroad—and the first time he had ever left Russia—took him to Latvia in 1940. "But that," says Vishinsky, "wasn't 'abroad' long." As a traveling deputy since then, Vishinsky has handled Kremlin matters with cold-blooded finesse in Italy and the Balkans, as well as at international conferences.