TUKHACHEVSKIY, MIKHAIL NIKOLAYEVICH (1893–1937).
Tukhachevskiy was the wunderkindof the Red Army. A tsarist guards
officer, he was captured in World War Iand spent time in the same
prisoner of war camp as Charles de Gaulle. He joined the Bolshevik
Partyand commanded armies in the early 1920s, and from 1925 to
1928 he was chief of staff of the Soviet armed forces. In 1935 he was
one of five men promoted to the rank of marshal of the Soviet Union.
Unfortunately, Tukhachevskiy had made a mortal enemy in Joseph
Stalin in 1921 when they served in the war against Poland.
Tukhachevskiy had blamed Stalin for malfeasance and publicly re-
buked Stalin for gross strategic incompetence. Stalin did not forget
the insults.
In the spring of 1937, Stalin decided to move against what he saw
as dissent in the army. This was not, as many intelligence historians
maintain, a result of secret information provided by the Czechs; it re-
sulted from Stalin’s decision to purge the military. People close to
Tukhachevskiy were arrested and tortured into confessing that
Tukhachevskiy and other senior officials were Nazi agents. On 22
May 1937, Tukhachevskiy and other senior officers were arrested,
tortured by the NKVD, and confessed. Tukhachenskiy’s dossier was
splattered with his blood, according to witnesses. On 11 June,
Tukhachevskiy and other senior officers were tried by a special mil-
itary court, convicted, and immediately shot.
Following Tukhachevskiy’s execution, the NKVD fell upon the
army, arresting between 30,000 and 40,000 officers. Several thou-
sand general officers and colonels were shot in 1937–1940, including
three of five marshals, 15 of 16 army commanders, 50 of 57 corps
commanders, and more than half of the division and brigade com-
manders. In the Soviet navy, eight of nine four-star admirals were
shot. Party commissars in the army and navy staff suffered the same
fate: all 16 army commissars were shot, as were 25 of 28 army corps
commissars. All were loyal to Stalin, the state, and the army.
Tukhachevskiy and almost all his colleagues were formally reha-
bilitated in 1956 by Nikita Khrushchev. The real cost of the
Tukhachevskiy affair was the abysmal performance of the Red Army
in the Winter War against Finland in 1939–1940 and the opening bat-
tles of World War II. Incompetent staff officers and commanders
were incapable of fighting the German Wehrmacht, and millions ofTUKHACHEVSKIY, MIKHAIL NIKOLAYEVICH (1893–1937)• 27106-313 P-Z.qxd 7/27/06 7:57 AM Page 271