Mikhail Tukhachevsky

90
Mikhail Tukhachevsky bigraphy, stories - Marshal of the Soviet Union

Mikhail Tukhachevsky : biography

February 16, 1893 – June 12, 1937

Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevsky ( February 4 (February 16) 1893 – June 12, 1937) was a Marshal of the Soviet Union, commander in chief of the Red Army (1925–1928), and one of the most prominent victims of Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge.

The reform of the Red Army

According to Simon Sebag Montefiore, Joseph Stalin regarded Tukhachevsky as his bitterest rival and dubbed him Napoleonchik (little Napoleon).Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, pages 221-222. Upon Stalin’s ascension to Party leadership in 1929, he began receiving denunciations from senior officers who disapproved of Tukhachevsky’s tactical theories. Then, in 1930, the OGPU forced two officers to testify that Tukhachevsky was plotting to overthrow the Politburo via a coup d’état.Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, page 58-59.

According to Montefiore,In 1930, this was perhaps too outrageous even for the Bolsheviks. Stalin, not yet dictator, probed his powerful ally Sergo Ordzhonikidze: "Only Molotov, myself, and now you are in the know… Is it possible? What a business! Discuss it with Molotov…" However, Sergo would not go that far. There would be no arrest and trial of Tukhachevsky in 1930: the commander, "turns out to be 100% clean," Stalin wrote disingenuously to Molotov in October, "That’s very good." It is interesting that seven years before the Great Terror, Stalin was testing the same accusations against the same victims — a dress rehearsal for 1937 — but he could not get the support. The archives reveal a fascinating sequel: once he understood the ambitious modernity of Tukhachevsky’s strategies, Stalin apologised to him: "Now the question has become clearer to me, I have to agree that my remark was too strong and my conclusions were not right at all."Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, page 59.

Following this, Tukhachevsky wrote several books on modern warfare and in 1931, after Stalin had accepted the need for an industrialized military, Tukhachevsky was given a leading role in reforming the army. He held advanced ideas on military strategy, particularly on the use of tanks and aircraft in combined operations.

Tukhachevsky took a keen interest in the arts, and during this period became a political patron and close friend of composer Dmitri Shostakovich: they met in 1925,Elizabeth Wilson, Shostakovich: a Life Remembered, p. 39. and subsequently played music together at the Marshal’s home (Tukhachevsky played the violin). In 1936, Shostakovich’s music was under attack following the Pravda denunciation of his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. However, Tukhachevsky intervened with Stalin on his friend’s behalf. After Tukhachevsky’s arrest pressure was put on Shostakovich to denounce him, but he was saved from doing so by the fact that the investigator was himself arrested.Elizabeth Wilson, pp. 124-5.

In popular culture

Marshal Tukhachevsky appears as a character in the anthology Apricot Jam and Other Stories, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In a short story about Marshal Georgii Zhukov’s vain attempts at writing his memoirs, the retired Marshal reminisces about serving under Tukhachevsky against the Tambov rebellion. He recalls Tukhachevsky’s first address to the Red Army officers and men, in which he announced that total war tactics will be henceforth used against civilians who assist or even sympathise with the Tambov rebels. Zhukov also recalls his subsequent assignment as a staff officer to Tukhachevsky and how close he came to being executed following Tukhachevsky’s fall.

Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky is also the tragic hero of the 2010 television movie Tukhachevsky, Conspiracy Marshal (Russian: Тухачевский, маршал заговор).

Aftermath

Tukhachevsky’s family members all suffered after his execution. His wife Nina Tukhachevskaya, and his brothers Alexandr and Nikolai (both were instructors in a Soviet military academy) were all shot. Three of his sisters were sent to the Gulag. His under-aged daughter was arrested when she reached adult age and remained in the camps until the Khrushchev thaw. She lived in Moscow after her release and died in 1982.Sergeyev (1991): p.44