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As Vishinsky strode to his seat, there was frantic applause from the Soviet bloc. Said France's sad-eyed Georges Bidault next day: "The French delegation deems it futile and dangerous to conceal the magnitude and seriousness of the crisis. ... At stake we have . . . the very life of the United Nations." Said Britain's Hector McNeil: if Russia persists in trying to force its will on the world, "the unstable peace of the world will crumble and crash [with] hideous consequences."
In Moscow, the newspapers gave Vishinsky's blast the full treatment: full-page spreads for two days. Moscow's Literary Gazette shouted that U.S. foreign policy was "a program for invasion of the world." It scornfully compared President Harry Truman with Adolf Hitler: "The haberdasher from Jackson [sic] is straining for the laurels of the corporal from Munich."
If Vishinsky had meant to sow dissension in the U.N., he had chiefly succeeded in sandbagging the peace-loving nations. If he had meant to sow dissension in the U.S., he had a lot to learn about Americans. The amplifications, and the fury of his delivery were the mouthings of a bully whose number has been called. Cracked one wag: "I guess Uncle Joe has not got The Bomb."
Before he blew, Vishinsky might have done well to take some tips from a member of his delegation who has had some experience in American affairs: Sergei Kudryavtsev, whom the Royal Commission's report credits with helping to rig the spy ring which operated chiefly for the purpose of stealing atomic secrets, in Canada and the U.S.
The Comrade. Who was this angel of peace? As is the case with many Communists, Vishinsky's biography was self-consciously sketchy. But one glaring fact stood out: at 63, Andrei Vishinsky was old enough to have been an Old Bolshevik. Instead, for a longer period than he liked to remember, he had been an Old Menshevik.* It was a distinction that could matter in Soviet Russia, where public expression of the social-democratic Menshevik principles (reform instead of revolution) could get a man shot, and often did.
Vishinsky was further hampered by a strictly bourgeois background. From Austrian Emperor Francis II, a branch of the Vishinsky family in Austrian Galicia received the 18th Century title of Barons of the Holy Roman Empire. Andrei Vishinsky's branch—settling in Kiev—remained untitled. But Andrei's father became well-to-do on his fees as government-appointed notary in the booming oil city of Baku.
Father Vishinsky sent red-haired young Andrei to schools in Baku and Kiev. The boy was a capable scholar, something of a Beau Brummell, a very good dancer, self-assured to the point of arrogance. But as a law student at Kiev University after 1901, Vishinsky became absorbed with politics, joined the Mensheviks. For his part in organizing a railway strike, during the 1905 revolution (Lenin's "dress rehearsal" for 1917), he spent a year in jail. Then he went back to studying law.