Ever since Stalin's death and Nikita Khrushchev's sensational revelations of the tyrant's betrayals of "Socialist legality." Soviet citizens have been told that they will get formal safeguards under the law. All leading Soviet jurists now brand as "erroneous" the specious justifications by which the late Andrei Vishinsky, Stalin's top prosecutor, 1) upheld police terror, 2) used confessions alone to prove guilt, and 3) when no law applied, invoked other laws "by analogy" to send innumerable men to death or slavery in the theatrical purge trials of the '30s.
Last week, after years...