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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%."