theoreticians, including Soviet Prosecutor General Andrey Vyshinsky. According to Vyshinsky, Krylenko's imprecise definition of crimes and his refusal to define terms of punishment introduced legal instability and arbitrariness and were, therefore, against the interests of the Party. Their debates continued throughout 1935 and were inconclusive. With the start of the Great Purge after Sergei Kirov's assassination on December 1, 1934, Krylenko's star began to fade and Stalin began to increasingly favor Vyshinsky. Notably, it was Vyshinsky and not Krylenko who prosecuted the first two high-profile Moscow show trials of Old Bolsheviks in August 1936 and January 1937. Krylenko's ally, the Marxist theoretician Eugen Pashukanis, was subjected to severe criticism in late 1936 and arrested in January 1937 and shot in September. Soon after Pashukanis's arrest, Krylenko was forced to publicly "admit his mistakes" and concede that Vyshinsky and his allies had been right all along. In 1936 Krylenko justified the inclusion of a law against male homosexuality in the 1934 Soviet penal code as a measure directed against subversive activities: Fall from power and execution Krylenko was promoted to Commissar of Justice of the USSR on July 20, 1936, and was directly involved in the first waves of Joseph Stalin's Great Purges between 1935 and 1938. However, at the first session of the newly reorganized Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union in January 1938, he was denounced by an up-and-coming Stalinist, Mir Jafar Baghirov: The attack had been carefully prepared in advance and Molotov endorsed it. In response, Stalin removed Krylenko from his post on January 19, 1938, turning the Commissariat over to his replacement, N. M. Rychkov. Leaving the Kremlin, Krylenko and his family traveled to his dacha outside Moscow. On the evening of January 31, 1938, Krylenko received a phone call from Stalin, who told him, saying: "Don't get upset. We trust you. Keep doing the work you were assigned to on the new legal code." This phone call calmed Krylenko, but later that evening his home was raided by an NKVD squad. Krylenko and his family were arrested. After three days of interrogation and torture by the NKVD, Krylenko "confessed" that he had been a "wrecker" since 1930. On April 3, he made an additional statement, claiming to have been an enemy of Lenin before the October Revolution. During his last interrogation on June 28, 1938, Krylenko named thirty Commissariat of Justice officials whom he had allegedly