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Mikhail Tukhachevsky was born in Slednevo, Russia, on 4th February, 1893. Lvov, Galicia, in 1885. Born into a noble family, Tukhachevsky graduated from the Alekzanderskoe Military Academy in 1914.

Tukhachevsky fought in the Russian Army during the First World War. After the October Revolution he joined the Bolsheviks. Tukhachevsky became an officer in the Red Army and was given responsibility of defending Moscow in 1918.

Leon Trotsky gave Tukhachevsky command of the 5th Army in 1920 and he managed to capture Siberia from Alexander Kolchak. He also helped defeat General Anton Denikin in the Crimea in 1920. Tukhachevsky fought in Poland and helped suppress the Kronstadt Rising in 1921.

Tukhachevsky served as chief of staff (1925-28) and as deputy commissar for defence. He wrote several books on modern warfare and in 1931 was given a leading role in reforming the Red Army.

In 1935 Tukhachevsky was made a marshal of the Soviet Union. However, Joseph Stalin became convinced that the leaders of the Red Army were involved in a plot to overthrow him. In June, 1937, Tukhachevsky and seven other top commanders were arrested and charged with conspiracy with Germany. Mikhail Tukhachevsky was found guilty and executed on 11th June, 1937.

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(1) Leopold Trepper, the head of the Red Orchestra in Europe, discovered from the Gestapo why Mikhail Tukhachevsky was arrested and executed in 1937. He wrote about this in his autobiography, The Great Game (1977)

In 1936 Heydrich, chief of Intelligence in Germany, received a visit from a former officer in the Czarist army, General Skoblin. This general without an army was consoling himself for his inactivity by playing double agent on a grand scale. For many years he had been working for Soviet Intelligence on the side.

The news he brought Heydrich was momentous: he had it on good authority that Marshal Tukhachevsky was plotting an armed insurrection against Stalin. Heydrich passed this on to the Nazi high command, who discussed what course to follow. There were only two options: allow the head of the Soviet Army to go ahead with the plan, or warn Stalin and, as a bonus, give him proof of the marshal's collusion with the Wehrmacht. The second solution was chosen.

(2) William Stephenson, head of the British Secret Intelligence Service in the United States, report on Reinhard Heydrich (1937)

The most sophisticated apparatus for conveying top-secret orders was at the service of Nazi propaganda and terror. Heydrich had made a study of the Russian OGPU, the Soviet secret security service. He then engineered the Red Army purges carried out by Stalin. The Russian dictator believed his own armed forces were infiltrated by German agents as a consequence of a secret treaty by which the two countries helped each other rearm. Secrecy bred suspicion, which bred more secrecy, until the Soviet Union was so paranoid it became vulnerable to every hint of conspiracy.

Late in 1936, Heydrich had thirty-two documents forged to play on Stalin's sick suspicions and make him decapitate his own armed forces. The Nazi forgeries were incredibly successful. More than half the Russian officer corps, some 35,000 experienced men, were executed or banished.

The Soviet chief of Staff, Marshal Tukhachevsky, was depicted as having been in regular correspondence with German military commanders. All the letters were Nazi forgeries. But Stalin took them as proof that even Tukhachevsky was spying for Germany. It was a most devastating and clever end to the Russo-German military agreement, and it left the Soviet Union in absolutely no condition to fight a major war with Hitler.