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TheCase of the Trotskyist Anti-Soviet Military Organization, also known as theMilitary Case or theTukhachevsky Case, was a 1937 secret trial of the high command of theRed Army, a part of theGreat Purge.
The Case was asecret trial, unlike theMoscow Show Trials. It is traditionally considered one of the key trials of theGreat Purge. MarshalMikhail Tukhachevsky and the senior military officersIona Yakir,Ieronim Uborevich,Robert Eideman,August Kork,Vitovt Putna,Boris Feldman, andVitaly Primakov (as well asYakov Gamarnik, who committed suicide before the investigations began) were accused ofanti-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 theSupreme Court of the Soviet Union.
The Tribunal was presided over byVasili Ulrikh and included marshalsVasily Blyukher,Semyon Budyonny,Alexander Yegorov; Army CommandersYakov Alksnis,Boris Shaposhnikov,Ivan Belov,Pavel Dybenko, andNikolai Kashirin; and Corps CommanderYelisey Goryachev. Only Ulrikh, Budyonny and Shaposhnikov would survive thepurges that followed.
The trial triggered a massive subsequent purge of theRed Army. In September 1938, the People's Commissar for Defense,Kliment Voroshilov, reported that a total of 37,761 officers andcommissars 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. Formertsarist officers had been purged in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The latter purge was accompanied by the "exposure" of the "Former Officers Plot" codenamedOperation Vesna. 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 theCentral Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), whereVyacheslav Molotov called for more thorough exposure of "wreckers" within the Red Army since they "had already been found in all segments of theSoviet economy".
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GeneralMikhail 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 andespionage forNazi Germany, based on confessions obtained from other arrested officers.
Before 1990, it was frequently argued[by whom?] that the case against the eight generals was based on forged documents created by theAbwehr, documents that deludedStalin 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, theNKVD 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 toReinhard Heydrich, chief of the GermanSicherheitsdienst intelligence arm.[2] Seeing an opportunity to strike a blow at both the Soviet Union and his archenemyWilhelm 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 viaEdvard Beneš and other neutral parties. Nevertheless, Soviet military prosecutors relied mostly on false confessions extorted or beaten out of the defendants rather than the forged documents during the case.[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 wererehabilitated 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 onforced 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.”
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 theSoviet-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 the1941 Red Army Purge, enabled the early rapid successes of the GermanWehrmacht in the1941 Invasion of Russia, leading to severe loss of life and the devastation of most of the European section of theUSSR.[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 theRed Army command can be seen as a preemptive move by Stalin andNikolai Yezhov, People's Commissar of State Security, to eliminate a potential rival and source of opposition to their planned purge of thenomenklatura. 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 whyTukhachevsky was killed is because he failed to conquerPoland during the Polish-Soviet War; despite this failure, Tukhachevsky had made a career in the party when he suppressed theTambov 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.[citation needed]
Vadim Rogovin's book1937: Stalin's Year of Terror contains a lengthy discussion of another unexplained mystery: that it took only about two weeks to forceadmissions of guilt from the accused despite the fact that all of them were relatively young, able-bodied military trained people. Rogovin contrasts it with theJewish Anti-Fascist Committee, where the inquest lasted about four years, despite brutal tortures.