Aron Naumovich Trainin

Aron Naumovich Trainin a.k.a. Moshe Aron Naumovich Trainin a.k.a. Moshe Aron Nahimovich Trainin (Russian: Аро́н Нау́мович Трайнин, Мовша-Арон Нау́мович Трайнин, Мовша-Арон Нохимович Трайнин, romanized: Aron Naumovič Trajnin, Hebrew: משה אהרן נחומאָוויטש טריינין‎) was a Soviet jurist and criminologist. He was born on 26 June [O.S. July 8] 1883, in Vitebsk, in the Russian Empire, to a Russian Jewish merchant family.[1] He died on 7 February 1957, in Moscow, in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, from a heart attack.[1] Trainin attended the gymnasium of Kalúga, graduating in 1903, the same year he matriculated to Moscow State University (MGU), whence he graduated in 1908.[1] At university he participated in the студе́нчество, "studénčestvo", student activist movement, during the pivotal, though failed, 1905 Russian Revolution.[1]

Trainin in the 1920s.

After graduation Trainin worked in the MGU Department of Criminal Law, on track for a professorship, but he would resign his position in 1912 in connection with the "Kasso Case", in which a great many academics resigned out of solidarity with the targets of Imperial Education Minister Lev Aristidovich Kasso.[1] From 1912 to 1918 he taught at the People's University of A. L. Shanyavsky in Moscow.[1]

From 1916 to 1917 he was an editor of the Jewish newspaper Новый путь: еженедв̌льник, посвященный вопросам еврейской жизни, 'New Way: A Weekly Dedicated to Questions of Jewish Cultural Life'.[1] He was a founding member of the Moscow chapter of the Political Red Cross,[1] which was formed in 1918.[2]

Trainin came to prominence in the inter-war years as critical of the League of Nations for not doing enough to prosecute the those who waged war against peace. Scholars Francine Hirsch of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Kirsten Sellars of the National University of Singapore, and Michelle Jean Penn of the University of Colorado Boulder credit him with establishing the international legal concept of "crimes against peace".[1][3][4]

Trainin speaks in London in August 1945 at the Nüremberg Tribunals War Crimes Executive Committee.

In 1937 Trainin published his 'The Defense of Peace and Criminal Law' in which he castigated the League of Nations for failing to make aggressive war a criminal offense and not providing for any sort of international court to punish aggressors. Along with Major-General Iona Timofeevich Nikitchenko, who also served as a judge, Trainin was a signatory for the Soviet Union to the charter of the Allies of World War II War Crimes Executive Committee which established the Nüremberg International Military Tribunal for "the prosecution and punishment of the major war criminals of the European Axis",[5] known in Russian as the "London Agreement", 'Лондонском соглашении'.

In 2017 Penn wrote,[1]

As a Soviet lawyer, Trainin's job [was] to argue for, and justify the Soviet Union's positions regardless of their morality or immorality, in the same way that John Yoo used legal argument to justify the United States' legitimization of torture under George Bush.

Trainin later became a Corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1946). In 1947 and 1948 he served as vice-president of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. His major works were On Complicity (1941) and Elements of a Crime According to Soviet Criminal Law (1951).

In 1945, in Fundamental Principles of Soviet Criminal Law, he wrote,[6]

Soviet law combines formal definition of crime with material definition of it. Soviet law defines crime as an act of commission (or omission) dangerous to the community, transgressing the foundations of the Soviet System or Socialist law and order (material feature) and entailing punishment by law (formal feature).

Trainin was awarded two Orders of the Red Banner of Labor.