Revolutionary State-Making in Dar es Salaam: African liberation and the global Cold War, 1961–1974

Hirsch’s book restores life to the Soviet delegation and overturns a long-running tradition of seriously underestimating their intellectual contributions. Hirsch focuses on legal scholar Aron Trainin, virtually absent from most accounts. In his brilliant East West Street, Philippe Sands traced the emergence of international criminal law and the idea of genocide to the hitherto ‘peripheral’ inter-war law faculties of the former Austro-Hungarian empire in L’viv and Krakow. Sands focuses on the figures of Hersch Lauterpacht and Raphael Lemkin and their personal connection to the Holocaust as well as their legal contributions. Hirsch tells a parallel Soviet story with Trainin, though she stops short of diving into a full intellectual history. Trainin’s 1930s idea of codifying ‘crimes against peace’, Hirsch argues, was a direct inspiration for the most important charge in the Nuremberg indictment: the ‘crime of aggression’ for unprovoked warfare. Merging the accounts of Sands and Hirsch together, one is given the fascinating prospect of a Nuremberg founding moment for crimes against humanity that was mostly shaped by legal figures in East Central and Eastern Europe: Lemkin and Trainin, as well as Czechoslovak jurist Bohuslav Ečer and Romanian jurist Vespasian Pella. The book’s final chapters briskly run through the immediate aftermath of the trial. Hirsch casts the post-Nuremberg months of 1947 as a Soviet moment of opportunity squandered. Hirsch highlights the case of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL), which Trainin helped to establish in 1946 alongside the father of human rights law, René Cassin. The sight of hundreds of leading judges and lawyers from around the world congregating in Prague in September 1948 for the IADL’s Second Congress – just months after Klement Gottwald’s Moscow-backed coup – constituted a major diplomatic success for the Soviets. But by then, Hirsch notes, Stalinist antisemitic purges were already underway in Moscow and Trainin was in their sights. Moreover, the Kremlin’s appetite for waging Soviet diplomacy through leadership in international law was already gone. Ultimately, Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg brilliantly demonstrates that the IMT was about much more than prosecuting individuals: it provided a global stage for Soviet diplomacy in the early Cold War, an outlet for Soviet intellectual currents in international law and the chance to write the history of the Second World War as a Soviet story. Hirsch succeeds in capturing each of these opportunities brilliantly, as well as demonstrating how they were consistently undermined through institutionalised Soviet mismanagement and fear.