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.
(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.
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