with Joseph Stalinin 1907–1908. He apparently befriended Stalin,
feeding him from food packages he received from his wealthy par-
ents. In the late 1920s Vyshinsky entered the procuracyand was the
lead prosecutor in the three Moscow Trials. Vyshinsky gained an in-
ternational reputation from his rhetoric: he demanded in all three tri-
als that the defendants, “these mad dogs,” be shot. He was made
procurator general of the country in 1938 and sat on three-person spe-
cial courts that sent thousands of men and women to their death.
Beginning in 1939, Stalin used Vyshinsky in diplomatic missions
to the Baltic and Eastern Europe, promoting him to deputy foreign
minister. Over the next five years, he was Stalin’s enforcer, shaping
governments, crafting agreements, and ordering the arrests of real
and suspected enemies. In May 1945 Stalin sent Vyshinsky to Berlin
to act as Marshal Georgi Zhukov’s “political advisor.” Vyshinsky
later served at the Nuremberg trials as an advisor to the Soviet judges
and prosecutors. He was rewarded by Stalin for his work on the court
and in Eastern Europe by promotion to minister of foreign affairs and
to chief of the Komitet Informatsii(Committee of Information). He
died in 1954 of a heart attack.
Vyshinsky was one of Stalin’s most successful and long-standing
servants. A cultured man from a family of Polish aristocrats with a
prerevolutionary legal education, he became the public face of Stalin’s
justice to Soviet citizens and the world. The Soviet archives show that
his speeches at the Moscow Trials were edited and rewritten by Stalin.
Yet he apparently lived with dread that the wheels of history could
crush him, as they had many of his victims. Vyshinsky, according to
longtime foreign minister Anatoly Gromyko, lived in fear of
Lavrenty Beria. When Beria called, Vyshinsky sprang to attention.
Vyshinsky, Gromyko claimed, “cringed like a dog before his master.”- W –
WALKER SPY RING. The most significant victory of Soviet intelli-
gence in the Cold Warmay have been the recruitment of four Amer-
icans with knowledge of military and intelligence codes. John
Walker, a U.S. Navy warrant officer who had served on nuclear sub-
marines and was deeply in debt, walked into the Soviet embassy inWALKER SPY RING• 28106-313 P-Z.qxd 7/27/06 7:57 AM Page 281