Editing Andrey Vyshinsky (section)

===Bolsheviks in power===
[[File:Lenin Zinoviev Kamenev Vyshinsky (cropped).jpg|thumb|left|300px|Andrei Yanuaryevich Vyshinsky (bottom, right of [[Lenin]], with buttoned shirt), 1922. Kamenev, Lenin, Zinoviev, at a congress of the [[All-Russian Central Executive Committee]]. 14 years later he would become the chief prosecutor at the [[Moscow Trials]], where Zinoviev and Kamenev would be sentenced to death.]]
Becoming a member of the [[nomenklatura]] he became a prosecutor in the new Soviet legal system, began a rivalry with a fellow lawyer, [[Nikolai Krylenko]], and in 1925 was elected rector of [[Moscow State University|Moscow University]], which he began to clear of "unsuitable" students and professors.<ref>Vaksberg, ''Stalin's Prosecutor'', 36, 39-40.</ref>

In 1928, he presided over the [[Shakhty Trial]] against 53 alleged counter-revolutionary "wreckers".<ref>Vaksberg, ''Stalin's Prosecutor'', 43.</ref> Krylenko acted as prosecutor, and the outcome was never in doubt. As historian [[Arkady Vaksberg]] explains, "all the court's attention was concentrated not on analyzing the evidence, which simply did not exist, but on securing from the accused confirmation of their confessions of guilt that were contained in the records of the preliminary investigation."<ref>Quotation from Vaksberg, ''Stalin's Prosecutor'', 44.</ref>

In November–December 1930, he presided as judge over the [[Industrial Party Trial]], with Krylenko as prosecutor, which was accompanied by a storm of international protest.<ref>{{cite web |last1=Medvedev |first1=Roy |title=On Stalin and Stalinism: Political Essays |url=http://abkhazworld.com/aw/Pdf/On_Stalin_and_Stanilism.pdf |website=JPRS Report |publisher=U.S. Department of Commerce |access-date=30 June 2023}}</ref> In this case, all eight defendants confessed their guilt. As a result, he was promoted.<ref>Vaksberg, ''Stalin's Prosecutor'', 51-54.</ref> In April 1933, he was prosecutor in the [[Metro-Vickers Affair|Metro-Vickers trial]], at which eight out of 18 defendants were British engineers, and which resulted in relatively light sentences.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Conquest |first1=Robert |title=The Great Terror, Stalin's Purge of the Thirties |date=1971 |publisher=Penguin |location=Harmondsworth, Middlesex |pages=736–39}}</ref>

He carried out administrative preparations for a "systematic" drive "against harvest-wreckers and grain-thieves".<ref>"Soviet Crop Failure: New Campaign against 'Wreckers{{'"}}, ''[[The Times]]'', 10 August 1933</ref>