Killing Tukhachevsky
Power Politics in The High Command
Tukhachevsky persists in the historical imagination as a deeply fascinating character. The “Red Napoleon” who never was, a brilliant military thinker whose life ended in abrupt fashion at the hands of the NKVD. The execution of Tukhachevsky and his allies has traditionally been characterized as a carefully orchestrated campaign of lethal repression carried out to ensure Stalin’s absolute power. This Cold War era narrative, which has largely been discredited with the opening of Soviet archives, has been used to show how Stalin’s ostensible megalomania sabotaged his own army’s prospects on the eve of war. On the other end, many contemporary Marxist-Leninists, adhering to the view of Stalin’s Soviet state, justify the execution of Tukhachevsky on the grounds that he was the ringleader of a fascist plot.
In contrast to both of these theories, I draw on the work of various historians to argue that the execution of Tukhachevsky was the outcome of a factional power-struggle between two competing visions over the strategic direction of the Red Army. Tukhachevsky’s notorious personal power ambitions and his embittered military-strategic opposition to Stalin’s officer, Voroshilov, were perceived as a source of internal disunity capable of a producing a crisis that could potentially derail the war effort. Historian Vladmir Rogovin, in reference to the Stalin-era purges, stressed the importance of needing “to separate the fantastic and absurd charges from the evidence of the defendants' genuine anti-Stalinist activity” (Rogovin, 1998, p. 482). This requires going beyond Stalin’s psychology and the sensationalism of the Moscow Show Trials to find the power-struggle and oppositional politics at the heart of this matter.
Historian Peter Whitewood, one of the few western historians who has done extensive historical research on the Stalin era Soviet military purges, explains how Cold-War era traditional accounts of the military purge rely on largely falsified evidence.
Common to Cold War accounts of the military purge is a story about a fabricated dossier of evidence that Stalin supposedly used to incriminate the senior officers he wanted out of the way. This dossier apparently contained falsified materials, which provided a smoking gun: a group of leading Red Army officers, with German assistance, were planning a coup … There is nothing to suggest that the dossier story has any basis in reality. Aside from the problems with the existing sources, there is also a complete absence of any other reliable evidence. After the opening of the Russian archives in the early 1990s, no piece of documentary evidence has been found to support the story (Whitewood, 2015, pp. 4-5)
The notion that Tukhachevsky was simply killed off because he was an obstacle in Stalin’s path to absolute personal power is rooted in a cold-war era understanding of the Stalinist period that has little evidential support. The actual motivations underlying these purges must be understood in the context of an impending total war which enabled drastic military decision-making. Stalin was infamous for his willingness to use mass violence to carry out state objectives, and the historian Geoffrey Roberts notes how Stalin’s indifference to the costs of mass violence sometimes proved necessary in the titanic struggle against Nazism. Roberts (2006, p. xii) writes that Stalin’s “methods were unpalatable but effective, and perhaps unavoidable if victory was to be secured,” and that he was “a leader prepared to compromise, adapt and change, as long as it did not threaten the Soviet system[.]” As we will see, the political maneuvering of Tukhachevsky and his allies against Stalin’s loyalists in the military elite was perceived as a threat to the unity of the Soviet system, a perception which was greatly exacerbated by domestic and international concerns. At the same time, the purge was not without considerable costs, deeply affecting military morale and organization, as it decimated talented officers and temporarily cast the Red Army into a state of disarray (Whitewood, 2015).
