NONFICTION - June 16, 1991

THE PROSECUTOR: Andrei Vyshinsky and the Moscow Show Trials by Arkady Vaksberg, translated by Jan Butler (Grove Weidenfeld: $19.95; 384 pp.). “No, it was not plausible, but it was true: In those days everything proved possible.” Soviet journalist Arkady Vaksberg is referring to the rumors that Stalin himself surreptitiously attended the last of the Moscow show trials of the late 1930s, but that sentence also describes the entire career of lawyer Andrei Vyshinsky, who lent his considerable intelligence and rhetorical skills to the savage and illegal purging of Stalin’s enemies. Vaksberg is less interested in writing a biography of Vyshinsky than in bearing witness to his state-sponsored crimes, and that makes “The Prosecutor” less accessible than it should be; the author provides little context, and condemns Vyshinsky at every opportunity instead of analyzing the man and the times that produced him. “The Prosecutor” is as much an exorcism as a work of history, and on that level it’s a blood-curdling catalogue of the evil even the most talented men--perhaps especially the most talented men--can do.