The Red Army and the Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Soviet Military by Peter Whitewood

Author:Peter Whitewood [Whitewood, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History
ISBN: 9780700621170
Google: kjeTrgEACAAJ
Goodreads: 25628480
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Published: 2015-09-25T00:00:00+00:00

At the same time as foreign agents and Trotskyists were judged to be pressing security threats for the Red Army in the mid-1930s, the rumors that certain senior officers in the high command were disloyal continued to filter into the Soviet Union. Although there was still no serious response to these rumors (and certainly no arrests), it remains likely that the NKVD continued to log each piece of material suggesting that the loyalty of the high command was not guaranteed. One report of disloyalty in the high command, for instance, surfaced in Czechoslovakia in December 1935 and was published in the Russian journal Znamia Rossii, which reported that an underground organization was supposedly operating in the Soviet Union under the name of Kraskomov. According to Znamia Rossii, the members of the organization were from the Red Army high command and planned the overthrow of Soviet power.168 As had been the case in the 1920s, some officers still received more attention than others. Tukhachevskii was as much an object of speculation as ever. For example, while on his way to England in January 1936 to attend the funeral of King George V, Tukhachevskii gave an interview to the Polish newspaper, Ekspress Poranni, which contained the following passage: “Tukhachevskii has always gone ‘with the wind’ (po vetru). In the past, when it had a purpose, he was considered to be a very staunch supporter of Trotsky. But he first turned his back on his patron as soon as he felt Trotsky was losing and firmly took Stalin’s side.”169 At a time of increasing pressure on the former opposition, being associated with Trotsky and depicted as politically capricious was potentially damaging.

The most prominent reports and rumors in the mid-1930s, however, concerned connections that supposedly existed between the Red Army and German military elites. In December 1935, a supposed secret connection between German officers and the Red Army high command was reported by the head of Soviet military intelligence.170 Then in April 1936, an intelligence report forwarded to Stalin with intercepted communication from the German embassy suggested that Tukhachevskii was close to the German high command. The report’s account of his behavior noted, “Tukhachevskii’s conduct was significant. . . . They say that he is a Francophile. Now in an extremely courteous tone he asked about the acquaintances of the German officers with interest. This is completely different behavior than before.”171 Further suggestions that Tukhachevskii was sympathetic to the Germans were received by Voroshilov from another military intelligence report in May 1936 that contained comments allegedly made by Hermann Göring during a meeting with the Polish minister of foreign affairs. According to this report, Göring said he had met with Tukhachevskii when the latter stopped in Berlin on his way back from George V’s funeral. Tukhachevskii had apparently raised the possibility of resuming the military collaboration between Germany and the Soviet Union.172 Göring’s supposed remarks may have been misinformation or incorrectly relayed by Soviet intelligence. Stalin publicly rejected the idea that Tukhachevskii met Göring

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