Roman Rudenko

The Soviet contribution to the prosecution at the International Military Tribunal was led by a thirty-eight-year-old Ukrainian lawyer named Roman Andreyevich Rudenko, who held the position of Procurator of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic when the appointment came in October 1945. He was the youngest of the four Chief Prosecutors at Nuremberg by fifteen years. He was also the only one whose government, at the moment he took up the brief, was actively suppressing evidence relevant to the trial in his own zone of occupation. The Soviet position at the IMT was, throughout the proceedings, the most contradictory of the four Allied positions. Rudenko had to manage these contradictions in public for ten and a half months. He did so with skill that has not, on the historical record, been adequately recognised in the West.

The opening

Rudenko delivered the Soviet opening on 8 February 1946. The opening ran for one full court day. It was structured around the German aggression against the Soviet Union, the conduct of the war in the East, and the killing of Soviet civilians and prisoners of war. The most quoted passages addressed the killing of Soviet POWs, of whom approximately 3.3 million had died in German captivity between 1941 and 1945, the largest single category of victims of the German war effort after the murdered Jews of Europe. Rudenko quoted at length from captured German military orders. He read out the Commissar Order of 6 June 1941, which had condemned all captured Soviet political officers to summary execution. He read out the directive of 8 September 1941 from the Wehrmacht High Command on the treatment of Soviet POWs, which had called Soviet captives members of an inferior race and authorised their starvation. He read out the orders for the deliberate creation of camps in which Soviet prisoners had been left in open enclosures through the winter of 1941 to 1942 with no shelter, no food, and no medical care.

The Soviet opening’s central rhetorical claim was on the scale of the killing in the East. Rudenko argued, with the documentation to support it:

The fascist invaders deliberately put into practice on Soviet territory a programme of physical extermination of the Slav peoples and of mass annihilation of the Jewish population. Tens of thousands of Soviet villages were destroyed. Twenty-five million Soviet citizens were rendered homeless. The fascist beasts murdered millions of women, children and old people on Soviet soil.

The figures Rudenko presented were broadly accurate, though the detailed work of subsequent Soviet and Russian historiography has refined them. The killing of Soviet Jews by the Einsatzgruppen, which Rudenko’s case treated as part of the wider campaign against Soviet citizens, was the largest single component of the Holocaust’s death toll: approximately 1.5 million Jews were killed on Soviet territory in 1941 to 1942 alone. The Soviet prosecution’s tendency to subsume the specific killing of Jews into the wider category of Soviet civilian losses has been criticised by subsequent historians. The criticism is justified. It was, in 1945 to 1946, the official Soviet line that the killing of Jews was one strand of a wider attack on the Soviet population. Rudenko was a Soviet prosecutor. He delivered the Soviet line.

The Katyn problem

The most substantial single difficulty Rudenko faced as a Chief Prosecutor was the case on the killing of approximately 22,000 Polish officers, intellectuals and civic leaders at Katyn Forest near Smolensk in April and May 1940. The killings had been carried out, on the documentary record, by the Soviet NKVD on the order of the Soviet Politburo. The mass graves had been discovered by the Germans in April 1943 and presented to the world as evidence of Soviet atrocities. The Soviet government had then accused the Germans of the killings. The Soviet delegation at the London Conference in summer 1945 had insisted on the inclusion of Katyn in the IMT indictment as a German war crime. Jackson, knowing or suspecting the Soviet responsibility, had agreed to its inclusion in order to keep the Soviet delegation in the trial.

Rudenko led the Katyn case at the IMT in the autumn of 1946. The proceedings on 1 to 3 July 1946 saw the Soviet prosecution call witnesses to support its claim that the Germans had carried out the killings. The defence cross-examined effectively. The bench, by the end of the proceedings, was in no doubt that the Soviet case had not been made. The judgment of October 1946 quietly omitted Katyn from the convictions on Count Three. The omission was the most pointed signal the bench gave during the trial that one of the prosecution governments had been lying. Rudenko had to walk out of the courtroom under that signal. He did so without public comment. The Soviet government did not acknowledge responsibility for Katyn until April 1990, when Mikhail Gorbachev formally admitted that the killings had been carried out by the NKVD. By then Rudenko had been dead for nine years.

The cross-examinations

Rudenko cross-examined Hermann Göring on the planning of the war against the Soviet Union, on 21 March 1946. The cross-examination was effective on the documentary record but did not produce the rhetorical highs of the Maxwell Fyfe sequences. He cross-examined Joachim von Ribbentrop on the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the secret protocols of which had divided Eastern Europe between Germany and the Soviet Union. The cross-examination was unavoidable; Ribbentrop had signed the pact with the Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov in August 1939. The Soviet government’s official position throughout the trial was that the secret protocols did not exist. Rudenko had to cross-examine Ribbentrop without acknowledging the protocols, which he did by limiting his questions to the public text of the pact. The defence team chose not to press the issue. The bench was aware. The cross-examination is not a model of legal advocacy. It is an example of what a prosecutor does when his own government’s lies constrain what he can ask.

The closing

Rudenko delivered the Soviet closing on 30 July 1946. The closing was orthodox Soviet political rhetoric of its period; it described the defendants as the agents of a fascist conspiracy that had threatened the existence of human civilisation and had been defeated by the heroism of the Soviet people. The legal sections were workmanlike. The political sections have not aged well. The closing’s most concrete contribution was its cataloguing of the Soviet civilian losses in the war: the destruction of 1,710 cities and towns, more than 70,000 villages, 32,000 industrial enterprises, 65,000 kilometres of railway. The figures were the foundation of the Soviet account of the war that endured throughout the Cold War and remain the foundation of the Russian account today.

Afterwards

Rudenko returned to Soviet politics in October 1946. He was appointed Procurator General of the Soviet Union in 1953, a post he held until his death in January 1981, twenty-eight years in the senior legal position of the Soviet state. He oversaw the legal aspects of the rehabilitation of millions of Soviet citizens who had been imprisoned under Stalin in the de-Stalinisation period of the late 1950s. He prosecuted the U-2 pilot Gary Powers in August 1960 in a Moscow show trial that he conducted with notable courtroom skill. He oversaw the legal aspects of the suppression of the Czechoslovakian reform movement in 1968. He died in office in January 1981 and was buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.

The Soviet historiography of his Nuremberg work was extensive in the postwar period and has been more critically reviewed since 1991, particularly on the Katyn issue. He was the only one of the four Chief Prosecutors who returned to a senior position in his own legal system; the others held no further substantive legal posts. He was, by the assessment of Telford Taylor in The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials, a competent professional working under impossible political constraints. The judgement is fair. The contradictions in the Soviet position at Nuremberg were not Rudenko’s. They were Stalin’s. Rudenko had to manage them. He did.

See also

Sources

  • International Military Tribunal, Trial of the Major War Criminals, vol VII (Rudenko opening) and vol XIX (Rudenko closing), Nuremberg, 1947
  • Francine Hirsch, Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal after World War II, Oxford University Press, 2020
  • George Ginsburgs, Moscow’s Road to Nuremberg: The Soviet Background to the Trial, Martinus Nijhoff, 1996
  • Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History, Doubleday, 2003
  • Norman Davies, God’s Playground: A History of Poland, vol II, Oxford University Press, 1981
  • Telford Taylor, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials, Knopf, 1992