Editor's Introduction

Abstract

Andrei Vyshinskii, Stalin's prosecutor during the Great Purge trials, is the subject of withering criticism in an article leading off this issue by the noted Soviet advocate of legal reform, Arkadii Vaksberg. One of several accounts of Soviet history now appearing in the Soviet Union that sometimes read in substance and tone not so differently from the writings of Richard Pipes, Robert Conquest, and even Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, this essay reveals that Vyshinskii, originally a Menshevik whom Vaksberg calls "a thug," albeit an erudite one, was especially zealous "in signing" an instruction to implement the Provisional Government's arrest order for Lenin. But the outspoken Vaksberg, crediting Vyshinskii in the 1920s with first attaching a "political hue" to common criminal acts, has written this article principally to marshall support for reforming a legal system whose underpinnings still owe much to the man the author calls "a monster."