Case of Trotskyist Anti-Soviet Military Organization

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The Case of Trotskyist Anti-Soviet Military Organization (Russian: "дело троцкистской антисоветской военной организации" or "дело антисоветской троцкистской военной организации") was a 1937 trial of high commanders of the Red Army, also known as "Case of Military" (Russian: "дело военных") and "Tukhachevsky's Case". During the trials it was also referred to as the "Military-Fascist Conspiracy" (Russian: "военно-фашистский заговор"), the "Military-Trotskyist Organization", and the "counter-revolutionary plot within RKKA".

[edit] The Defendants

The Case of Military was a secret trial, unlike the Moscow Show Trials. However, it was a sham in that its outcome was predetermined. Former Soviet government official and Stalin Terror survivor Alexander Barmine doubted there was really any 'trial' at all, noting that Stalin had ordered in advance that the eight generals be shot immediately following their court-martial.^[1]. It featured the same frame-up of the defendants encountered elsewhere during Stalin's purges, and is traditionally considered one of the key trials of the Great Purge. Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and the senior military officers Iona Yakir, Ieronim Uborevich, Robert Eideman, August Kork, Vitovt Putna, Boris Feldman and Vitaly Primakov (as well as Yakov Gamarnik, who committed suicide before the investigations began) were accused of anti-Soviet conspiracy and sentenced to death; they were executed on the night of June 11–12, 1937, immediately after the verdict delivered by a Special Session (специальное судебное присутствие) of the Supreme Court of the USSR. The Tribunal was presided by Vasili Ulrikh and included marshals Vasily Blyukher, Semyon Budyonny and Army Commanders Yakov Alksnis, Boris Shaposhnikov, Ivan Belov, Pavel Dybenko, and Nikolai Kashirin. Only Ulrikh, Budyonny and Shaposhnikov would survive the purges that followed.

The trial triggered a massive subsequent purge of the Red Army. In September 1938 the People's Commissar for Defence, Kliment Voroshilov, reported that a total of 37,761 officers and commissars were dismissed from the army, 10,868 were arrested and 7,211 were condemned for anti-Soviet crimes.

[edit] Background

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. Former tsarist officers had been purged in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The latter purge was accompanied by the "exposure" of the "Former Officers Plot". 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 the VKP(b) Central Committee, at which Vyacheslav Molotov called for more thorough exposure of "wreckers" within the Red Army, since they "had already been found in all segments of the Soviet economy".

[edit] The Evidence, Arrest, and Secret Trial

General Mikhail 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 and espionage for Germany, based on confessions obtained from a number of other arrested officers.

Before 1990, it was frequently argued that the case against the eight generals was based on forged documents created by the Abwehr, documents which deluded Stalin into believing that a plot was being fomented by Tukhachevsky and other Red Army commanders to depose him. However, after 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.^[2] At Stalin's order, the NKVD instructed one of its agents, Nikolai Skoblin, to pass to Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the German Nazi SD (Sicherheitsdienst) intelligence arm, concocted information suggesting a plot by Tukhachevsky and the other Soviet generals against Stalin.^[3] Seeing an opportunity to strike a blow at both the Soviet Union and his arch-enemy Admiral 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 via Beneš and other neutral parties. Stalin's archives indeed contain a number of messages received during 1920–30s duly reporting the possible involvement of Tukhachevsky with the "German Nazi leadership".

While the Germans believed they had successfully deluded Stalin into executing his best generals, in reality they had merely served as useful and unwitting pawns of Stalin. It is notable that the forged documents were not even used by Soviet military prosecutors against the generals in their secret trial, instead relying on false confessions extorted or beaten out of the defendants.^[4]

Tukhachevsky at secret trial, 11 June 1937

Afraid of the consequences of trying popular generals and war heroes in a public forum, Stalin ordered the trial also be kept secret, and that the defendants be executed immediately following their court-martial.^[5]. In the book The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, it is said that Tukhachevsky's confession, written by him, is stained in blood. From this, one could assume that Tukhachevsky and his fellow defendants were tortured.^{[citation needed]}

All convicts were rehabilitated on January 31, 1957 citing "absence of essence of an offence". It was concluded that arrests, investigations and trials were performed in violation of procedural norms and based on forced confessions, in many cases obtained with the aid of physical violence.

[edit] Unresolved issues

[edit] Reasons and motives

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 the Red Army command can be seen as a preemptive move by Stalin and Nikolai Yezhov, People's Commissar of State Security, to eliminate a potential rival and source of opposition to their planned purge of the nomenklatura. 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. Virtually all were executed.^[6]

Another suggestion is that Tukhachevsky and others did indeed try 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, motives 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.

Another reason is Stalin's antisemitism. Half of the accused were Jews: Yakir, Primakov, Feldman and Gamarnik. Still another is that Stalin harbored long-standing resentments against Red Army commanders with heroic Civil War military records that Stalin, as a mediocre military tactician and war commissar, could never equal.

Suvorov, in his "The Cleansing (Очищение)", made the rather startling claim that all of the accused Soviet generals from the Civil War era were absolutely incompetent as military leaders, thus requiring their removal and execution. To Suvorov, the veterans of the Russian Civil War were all undistinguished leaders of murdering bands who committed horrible crimes against their own people. These men 'needed' to be killed to ensure the advancement of new leaders. Against this argument is the proven record of many of the generals both during and after the Civil War, many of whom, such as Generals Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Iona Yakir, and Yacob Alksnis, all became accomplished military theorists and organizers of either the Red Army or the Soviet Air Forces (VVS). Their farsighted incorporation of new armored and airborne forces in Red Army military strategy, as well as support of ground forces by specially-equipped air force units would later be incorporated as standard Soviet military doctrine during World War II.^[7]. Suvorov also does not explain why Stalin chose to publicly disgrace and humiliate the generals, risking a possible military putsch, rather than simply force the retirement or resignation of such 'unworthy' commanders over time, while assigning them to unimportant commands to keep the remainder from interfering with reform of the Red Army. He also offers no explanation why one 'murdering band' veteran of the Civil War, Marshal Kliment Voroshilov,^[8] kept his position and life, even going on to lead an incompetent and failed offensive during the Winter War with Finland, while other, more capable Civil War veterans were purged and executed.

Corps commander V.M. Primakov, wearing the four rombs insignia of Army Commander 2nd rank (while being entitled to three rombs only).

[edit] Speedy inquest

Vadim Rogovin's book 1937: Stalin's Year of Terror contains a lengthy discussion of another unexplained mystery: it took only about two weeks to force admission of guilt from the accused, despite the fact that all of them, were relatively young, able-bodied military trained people. Rogovin contrasts it with the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, where the inquest lasted about 4 years, despite brutal tortures. One possible explanation is that the Soviet commanders, after a life of military service, could not stand up psychologically to the position of opposing their commander-in-chief. Another is that the men may have been tricked into signing confessions in the belief that their lives or those of their families would be spared, a tactic sometimes employed by Stalin.

[edit] Notes

[edit] Sources

• "Известия ЦК КПСС" ("Izvestiya TseKa KPSS" - Reports of the Central Committee of the CPSU), #4, April, 1989).
• Barmine, Alexander, One Who Survived, New York: G. P. Putnam (1945)
• "Report of the Party Commission headed by N. Shernik, June 1964." Voennye Arkhivy Rossii, No. 1. Moscow 1993.
• Lukes, Igor, Czechoslovakia Between Stalin and Hitler: The Diplomacy of Edvard Beneš in the 1930s, Oxford University Press (1996), ISBN 0195102673, 9780195102673,
• "M. N. Tukhachevskii i 'voenno-fashistskii zagovor,'" Voenno-istoricheskii Arkhiv, No. 1. Moscow, 1997.
• "The Case of the So-Called 'Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Military Organization' in the Red Army," Political Archives of the Soviet Union, vol. 1, No. 3., 1990.
• Suvorov, Viktor, The Cleansing (Очищение) by Suvorov, free Russian full text
• List of accused