 | This article needs additional citations for verification .(January 2013) |
The Case of the Trotskyist Anti-Soviet Military Organization, also known as the Military Case or the Tukhachevsky Case, was a 1937 secret trial of the high command of the Red Army, a part of the Great Purge.
The Case was a secret trial, unlike the Moscow Show Trials. It is traditionally considered one of the key trials of the Great Purge. Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and the senior military officers Iona Yakir, Ieronim Uborevich, Robert Eideman, August Kork, Vitovt Putna, Boris Feldman, and Vitaly Primakov (as well as Yakov Gamarnik, who committed suicide before the investigations began) were accused of anti-Soviet conspiracy and sentenced to death; they were executed on the night of June 11 to 12, 1937, immediately after the verdict delivered by a Special Session (специальное судебное присутствие) of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union.
The Tribunal was presided over by Vasili Ulrikh and included marshals Vasily Blyukher, Semyon Budyonny, Alexander Yegorov; Army Commanders Yakov Alksnis, Boris Shaposhnikov, Ivan Belov, Pavel Dybenko, and Nikolai Kashirin; and Corps Commander Yelisey Goryachev. Only Ulrikh, Budyonny and Shaposhnikov would survive the purges that followed.
The trial triggered a massive subsequent purge of the Red Army. In September 1938, the People's Commissar for Defense, Kliment Voroshilov, reported that a total of 37,761 officers and commissars were dismissed from the army, 10,868 were arrested and 7,211 were condemned for anti-Soviet crimes.
The trial was preceded by several purges of the Red Army. In the mid-1920s, Leon Trotsky was removed as Commissar of War, and his known supporters were expunged from the military. Former tsarist officers had been purged in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The latter purge was accompanied by the "exposure" of the "Former Officers Plot". The next wave of arrests of military commanders started in the second half of 1936 and increased in scope after the February–March 1937 Plenary Meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), where Vyacheslav Molotov called for more thorough exposure of "wreckers" within the Red Army since they "had already been found in all segments of the Soviet economy".
General Mikhail Tukhachevsky was arrested on May 22, 1937 and charged, along with seven other Red Army commanders, with the creation of a "right-wing-Trotskyist" military conspiracy and espionage for Nazi Germany, based on confessions obtained from other arrested officers.
Before 1990, it was frequently argued that the case against the eight generals was based on forged documents created by the Abwehr, documents that deluded Stalin into believing that a plot was being fomented by Tukhachevsky and other Red Army commanders to depose him. However, once Soviet archives were opened to researchers after the fall of the Soviet Union, it became clear that Stalin actually concocted the fictitious plot by the most famous and important of his Soviet generals in order to get rid of them in a believable manner. [1]
At Stalin's order, the NKVD instructed one of its agents, Nikolai Skoblin, to concoct information suggesting a plot by Tukhachevsky and the other Soviet generals against Stalin and pass it to Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the German Sicherheitsdienst intelligence arm. [2] Seeing an opportunity to strike a blow at both the Soviet Union and his archenemy Wilhelm Canaris of the German Abwehr, Heydrich immediately acted on the information and undertook to improve on it, forging a series of documents implicating Tukhachevsky and other Red Army commanders; these were later passed to the Soviets via Edvard Beneš and other neutral parties.
While the Germans believed they had successfully deluded Stalin into executing his best generals, in reality, they had merely served as useful and unwitting pawns of Stalin.[ clarification needed ] It is notable that the forged documents were not even used by Soviet military prosecutors against the generals in their secret trial but instead relied on false confessions extorted or beaten out of the defendants. [3]
Afraid of the consequences of trying popular generals and war heroes in a public forum, Stalin ordered the trial also be kept secret and for the defendants to be executed immediately following their court-martial. [4] Tukhachevsky and his fellow defendants were probably tortured into confessions. [5]
All convicts were rehabilitated on January 31, 1957 for the "absence of essence of an offence". It was concluded that arrests, investigations and trials were performed in violation of procedural norms and based on forced confessions, in many cases obtained with the aid of physical violence.[ clarification needed ]
“To the Red army, Stalin has dealt a fearful blow. As a result of the latest judicial frameup, it has fallen several cubits in stature. The interests of the Soviet defense have been sacrificed in the interests of the self-preservation of the ruling clique.”
Trotsky on the Red Army purges of 1937. [6]
The execution of General Tukhachevsky and the other seven generals severely weakened the Soviet military. This was first seen in the Red Army's disastrous performance in the Soviet-Finnish war of 1939-1940, in which the Soviet military suffered more than 100,000 dead or missing against a smaller and poorly-armed Finnish military. [7] The loss of the eight generals, combined with the 1941 Red Army Purge, enabled the early astonishing successes of the German Wehrmacht in the 1941 Invasion of Russia, leading to severe loss of life and the devastation of most of the European section of the USSR. [8]
There are no conclusive facts about the real rationale behind the forged trial. Over the years, researchers and historians put forth the following hypotheses:
The central hypothesis and the one with the widest support is that Stalin had simply decided to consolidate his power by eliminating any and all potential political or military rivals. Viewed from the broader context of the Great Terror which followed, the execution of the most popular and well-regarded generals in the Red Army command can be seen as a preemptive move by Stalin and Nikolai Yezhov, People's Commissar of State Security, to eliminate a potential rival and source of opposition to their planned purge of the nomenklatura. The fall of the first eight generals was swiftly followed by the arrest of most of the People's Commissars, nearly all regional party secretaries, hundreds of Central Committee members and candidates and thousands of lesser CPSU officials. At the end, three of five Soviet Marshals, 90% of all Red Army generals, 80% of Red Army colonels and 30,000 officers of lesser rank had been purged, [9] although some were allowed to return to service during World War II.
At first, it was thought 25-50% of Red Army officers were purged, but it is now known to be 3.7-7.7%. Previously, the size of the Red Army officer corps was underestimated, and it was overlooked that most of those purged were merely expelled from the Party. Thirty percent of officers purged during 1937 to 1939 were allowed back. [10]
Another suggestion is that Tukhachevsky and others indeed tried to conspire against Stalin. Leon Trotsky, in his later works, argued that while it was impossible to speak conclusively about the plot, he saw indications in Stalin's mania for involvement in every detail of Red Army organization and logistics that the military had real reasons for dissent, which may have eventually led to a plot. However, the revelations of Stalin's actions following the release of Soviet archival information have now largely discredited this theory. While the military may well have had many secret reasons for their dislike of Stalin, there is now no credible evidence that any of them ever conspired to eliminate him.[ citation needed ]
Victor Suvorov has claimed that the purge was intended to replace Red Army officers with more competent generals for his future conquests. For example, he claims that the ultimate reason why Tukhachevsky was killed is because he failed to conquer Poland during the Polish-Soviet War; despite this failure, Tukhachevsky had made a career in the party when he suppressed the Tambov rebellion. Suvorov compared the change of leadership in the Army to the teeth of a shark: each new row is sharper than the previous one.
Vadim Rogovin's book 1937: Stalin's Year of Terror contains a lengthy discussion of another unexplained mystery: that it took only about two weeks to force admissions of guilt from the accused despite the fact that all of them were relatively young, able-bodied military trained people. Rogovin contrasts it with the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, where the inquest lasted about four years, despite brutal tortures.
Kliment Yefremovich Voroshilov, popularly known as Klim Voroshilov, was a prominent Soviet military officer and politician during the Stalin-era. He was one of the original five Marshals of the Soviet Union, the second highest military rank of the Soviet Union, and served as Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the nominal Soviet head of state, from 1953 to 1960.
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, often shortened to the Red Army, was the army and air force of the Russian Soviet Republic and, from 1922, the Soviet Union. The army was established in January 1918 by Leon Trotsky to oppose the military forces of the new nation's adversaries during the Russian Civil War, especially the various groups collectively known as the White Army. In February 1946, the Red Army was renamed the "Soviet Army" - which in turn became the Russian Army on 7 May 1992, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Sergei Mironovich Kirov was a Russian and Soviet politician and Bolshevik revolutionary.
The Great Purge, or the Great Terror, also known as the Year of '37 and the Yezhovshchina, was Soviet General Secretary Joseph Stalin's campaign to consolidate his power over the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Soviet state. The purges also sought to remove the remaining influence of Leon Trotsky. The term great purge, an allusion to the French Revolution's Reign of Terror, was popularized by the historian Robert Conquest in his 1968 book The Great Terror.
Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevsky, nicknamed the Red Napoleon, was a Soviet general who was prominent between 1918 and 1937 as a military officer and theoretician. He was later executed during the show trials of 1936-38.
Marshal of the Soviet Union was the second-highest military rank of the Soviet Union. Joseph Stalin wore the uniform and insignia of Marshal after World War II.
Alexander Ilyich Yegorov or Egorov was a Soviet military leader and one of the original five Marshals of the Soviet Union.
Semyon Mikhailovich Budyonny was a Soviet cavalryman, military commander during the Russian Civil War, Polish-Soviet War and World War II, and politician, who was a close political ally of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.
Vasily Konstantinovich Blyukher was a Soviet military commander and Marshal of the Soviet Union.
Boris Mikhaylovich Shaposhnikov was a Soviet military officer, theoretician and Marshal of the Soviet Union. He served as the Chief of the General Staff of the Soviet Armed Forces from 1928 to 1931 and at the start of the Second World War. Shaposhnikov was one of the foremost military theorists during the Stalin-era. His most important work, Mozg Armii, is considered a landmark in Soviet military theory and doctrine on the organization of the Red Army's General Staff.
Pavel Efimovich Dybenko was a Bolshevik revolutionary and a leading Soviet officer and military commander. He was arrested, tortured and executed during the Great Purge and subsequently rehabilitated during the Khrushchev Thaw.
Iona Emmanuilovich Yakir was a Red Army commander and one of the world's major military reformers between World War I and World War II. He was an early and major military victim of the Great Purge, alongside Mikhail Tukhachevsky.
Alexander Grigoryevich Barmin, most commonly Alexander Barmine, was an officer in the Soviet Army and diplomat who fled the purges of the Joseph Stalin era for France and then United States, where he served the US government and also testified before congressional committees.
Vladimir Alexandrovich Antonov-Ovseenko, real surname Ovseenko, party aliases 'Bayonet' (Штык) and 'Nikita' (Никита), literary pseudonym A. Galsky, was a prominent Bolshevik leader, Soviet statesman, military commander, and diplomat.
Nikolai Vladimirovich Skoblin was a general in the White Russian army, a senior operative in the émigré expatriate Russian All-Military Union (ROVS) and a recruited Soviet spy, who acted as an intermediary between the NKVD and the Gestapo in the Tukhachevsky affair and was instrumental in the abduction of the ROVS chairman Gen Yevgeny Miller in Paris in 1937. He was married to the Russian singer Nadezhda Plevitskaya. A number of important details about his cooperation with the USSR′s intelligence agencies as well as exact circumstances of his death have remained controversial and contested.
Lev Zakharovich Mekhlis was a Soviet politician and a prominent officer in the Red Army from 1937 to 1940. As a senior political commissar, he became one of the main Stavka representatives on the Eastern Front (1941–1945) during World War II, being involved successively with five to seven Soviet fronts. Despite his fervent political engagement and loyalty to the Communist Party, various Soviet leaders, including Joseph Stalin, criticized and reprimanded Mekhlis for incompetent military leadership during World War II.
Avel Safronovich Yenukidze was a prominent Georgian "Old Bolshevik" and, at one point, a member of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (b) in Moscow. In 1932, along with Mikhail Kalinin and Vyacheslav Molotov, Yenukidze co-signed the infamous "Law of Spikelets". In 1918 to 1935 Yenukidze served as the Secretary of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet Union.
Between October 1940 and February 1942, in spite of the ongoing German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Red Army, in particular the Soviet Air Force, as well as Soviet military-related industries were subjected to purges by Joseph Stalin.
The Moscow trials were a series of show trials held by the Soviet Union between 1936 and 1938 at the instigation of Joseph Stalin. They were nominally directed against "Trotskyists" and members of the "Right Opposition" of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Dmitry Arkadievich Shmidt (Russian: Дмитрий Аркадьевич Шмидт; born David Aronovich Gutman was a Red Army Komdiv. Shmidt became a revolutionary before World War I and was imprisoned. He was drafted into the Imperial Russian Army at the beginning of 1915 and fought in World War I. Shmidt became a Full Cavalier of the Cross of St. George and an officer. After the February Revolution he led the Bolsheviks in his divisional committee. Shmidt joined the Red Army and fought in the Russian Civil War, initially as a partisan. He was awarded the Order of the Red Banner for his actions. After the end of the war he held command positions in cavalry units. He became commander of the 8th Mechanized Brigade in 1934. In 1936, Shmidt was one of the first Red Army officers to be arrested in the Great Purge, and was executed a year later. He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1957.