Thus, on June 12, the Soviet people knew: the reigning Marshal Tukhachevsky and such famous generals as Yakir, Uborevich, Kolker, Putna, Edro, Feldman, Primakov and others were shot, while yesterday they were considered the cream of the army and excellent strategists.
Even the entire Central Committee and the vast majority of the Politburo members never expected that Stalin would turn on this group of military cadres. Stalin only called an emergency meeting of the Politburo a few days before the beginning of this massacre, and Voloshilov, the People’s Commissar of Defense, made a report on the revelation of the conspiracy in the Red Army. Of the group of high-ranking generals accused of being Hitler’s spies, three were Jews! This alone is proof of how absurd this accusation was. Moreover, the Politburo members knew that if Tukhachevsky and his comrades were really Hitler’s spies, they would never have allowed Voroshilov to report to the Politburo, because he himself would have been arrested and imprisoned at least for “negligence”. He, the People’s Commissar for Defense, had recruited such a large group of spies and traitors, and had handed over to them the most important military districts of the Soviet Union, not to bring the country to ruin.
The performance of the members of the Politburo at this meeting was exactly in line with Stalin’s “requirements”. Each of them knew that if they did not speak carefully, they would not go Home after the meeting, but to prison. Even their personal drivers and guards were arranged by NKVD Commissar Yerev himself.
Immediately after the purge of Tukhachevsky and other generals, there was a great wave of arrests in the army. They had appointed a large number of officers when they were in office, and now, naturally, all of these people became suspected. If we consider that Tuchatchevsky was the deputy People’s Commissar of the Ministry of Defense for many years, it is easy to imagine how many military commanders he appointed and how many documents he issued. Today, all of these officers and people mentioned on the relevant documents are on the blacklist.
Hundreds of Red Army commanders are disappearing every day in the major Soviet military regions. Along with them, their closest deputies and those who seemed to be considered their friends were thrown into prison. In the first weeks and even the first months after the purge began, officers could be found to replace those arrested. But these replacements were often arrested again soon after their arrival, and it became difficult to find replacements for them.
In the summer of 1937, Stalin reinstated in the army the system of political commissars, which had been abolished by Lenin at the end of the civil war. The reason for providing political commissars to military commanders in the civil war. The main reason was that the new Red regime could not fully trust these military commanders: most of them had not long before been officers of the old tsarist army. Now that the composition of the officers had completely changed, they had all grown up and received military Education under the Soviet regime, and by providing them with political commissars, Stalin clearly showed his own distrust of these officers. What is more, Stalin went so far as to eliminate them by means of dealing with the enemy. It is now difficult to understand whether Stalin purged the Red Army officers in such a frenzied manner because he never trusted them or because he thought he could no longer continue to trust them. In short, the arrest of a large number of officers caused a sharp decline in the prestige of the military commanders among the troops, and accordingly, there was a state of indiscipline and low morale in the army, which could no longer be called a strong military force. If Hitler took advantage of this opportunity to attack the Soviet Union, he would undoubtedly win a great victory.
At the various troop party meetings and military conferences, the same question was often asked, “In whom should we trust?” This question left the newly appointed political commissars speechless and embarrassed. They had to ask the central government for clarification, but were met with the provocative reply, “Go trust your own military commanders!”
In August 1937, the fishy wind of purges of Red Army officers reached Spain. Many Soviet officers who had served as advisers in the General Command of the Spanish Republican Army were recalled to the Soviet Union by Voroshilov and were shot without any trial. Among them were the brigade commanders Kolev and Valua (these were their pseudonyms in Spain), who helped the Spanish government create the Republican Army, and the Soviet tank brigade commander Gorev, who was an advisor to the commander of the Madrid Front and bore the entire burden of defending Madrid. Also killed was Jan Berzin, once a close friend and drinking companion of Voroshilov, who was the chief military advisor to the Spanish government under the pseudonym “Grishin”.
Interestingly, two days before Gorev’s arrest, a solemn ceremony was held in the Kremlin, where Kalinin himself gave him a Lenin medal for his outstanding achievements in the Spanish Civil War. This detail shows that not even the Standing Committee of the Central Politburo was aware of who was blacklisted. Only two people – Stalin and Yezhov (and later Stalin and Beria) – decided on this list and other similar matters.
If Stalin had so little perversion in cutting out the old Bolsheviks, it is simply incomprehensible that he destroyed his own army, shook the pillars of his regime, and eliminated the best generals he had personally chosen and appointed.
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