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.