Golunskii, Sergei

Born July 4 (16), 1895, in Moscow; died there Nov. 29, 1962. Soviet legal scholar and diplomat; specialist in general theory of government and law, international law, court systems, and criminal procedure. Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1939). Became a member of the CPSU in 1941.

From 1923 to 1939, Golunskii worked in the procuracy; in 1939–40 he was the director of a section in the Institute of Law of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. From 1943 to 1952 he was head of the Treaty and Law Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the USSR, from 1954 to 1958 he directed the All-Union Research Institute of Criminal Law, and from 1959 to 1961 he was editor in chief of the journal Sovetskoe gosudarstvo i pravo (Soviet State and Law). He taught at the Military-Juridical Academy and at the Academy of Social Sciences of the Central Committee of the CPSU. He was a Soviet prosecutor at the Tokyo trial of Japanese war criminals (1946–48). In 1952–53 he was a member of the International Court of the United Nations.