Andrei Vyshinsky (1883-1954) was the state prosecutor in Stalin's purge trials in the 1930s and later served as head of the U.S.S.R.'s foreign ministry and as Soviet ambassador to the United Nations.

Andrei lanuar'evich Vyshinsky, also spelled Vyshinskii, became one of the Soviet Union's best known political figures in the early 1950s when he served as head of the Soviet mission to the United Nations (UN). A master of inflamatory rhetoric, combative, scornful, and ready in an instant to heap the most undiplomatic abuse on other UN spokesmen, Vyshinsky drew wide attention, none of it favorable. Visitors to the UN hoped to catch him in the act of banging his fist or flailing his arms. Delegates complained that he attacked them like criminals. At his death a few weeks before his 71st birthday on November 22, 1954, the New York Times called him a "master of...