One may ask; since the generals who signed the false verdict knew that Tukhachevsky and others were shot without trial, could Stalin tolerate the continued existence of these informants?
This question was answered by what Stalin did later. After using the names of these high-ranking generals to formally cover up the murder of Tukhachevsky and others. Stalin could not wait to put his gun to the heads of these “judges”. Apparently, their only “crime” was to learn about Stalin’s dirty deeds. In less than a year, the “judges” who had “tried” Marshal Tukhachevsky were arrested and shot one after another, namely: Air Force Commander Marshal Alexis, Commander of the Far Eastern Military District Marshal Buryukhur, Commander of the Leningrad Military District Commander Debinko, Commander of the Belarusian Military District Belov, Commander of the Far Caucasus Military District Kashlin. Neither any charges were brought against them, nor any kind of trial. They were simply suppressed. The word “repression” is used here in its most direct and dangerous sense.
Among the “judges” who “tried” Tukhachevsky, only two survived: Marshal Bujonny and Shaposhnikov, who was later promoted to the rank of marshal. Bujoni was a non-commissioned officer in the Tsarist Cossack army and later joined the revolution. As early as during the civil war, he became Stalin’s confidant and drinking companion. This man was particularly thick-skinned, not good at “talking”, but good at drinking and hunting women (especially the female secretaries of his men). Stalin certainly had no need to worry about such a Buccaneer.
Another surviving “judge”, Shaposhnikov, was a colonel officer in Tsarist Russia before the revolution and a hardened royalist. In the early years of the revolution, he saw the heads of his fellow officers fall to the ground. After joining the revolutionary ranks, he lived his Life in fear of losing his own life. Finally, one day, his Time came – Stalin found him and took him under his umbrella.
Among the five Soviet marshals, there was another one, named Alexander Egorov. At the outbreak of the October Revolution, he was a lieutenant colonel in the Tsarist army. In the civil war, he followed Tukhachevsky and commanded an army on the Polish front. At that time, Stalin worked for a while with Egorov’s commander as a political commissar (then called a member of the Revolutionary Military Committee). Stalin could not help but admire Yegorov’s military brilliance. The two of them became good friends. Many years later, when Stalin was falsifying the history of the civil war in order to belittle Trotsky and highlight himself, he repeatedly turned to Yegorov to act as an “impartial” witness for him. Stalin had four drinking buddies who met regularly. Yegorov was one of them. Their meetings were usually held in Bujoni’s dacha, instead of Stalin. After Stalin became the supreme dictator, he refused such flattery from almost all his old friends, but his friendship with Yegorov remained unchanged. Moreover, Stalin and Yegorov still referred to each other as “you”, as if they were confidants. Therefore, when Stalin began to systematically massacre the senior generals of the Red Army, no “well-informed” person expected that the butcher’s knife would be directed at Yegorov.
In the summer of 1937, a good friend of mine returned to Spain after a sabbatical in the country. He was very close to Yegorov’s daughter, so he knew a lot about Yegorov’s situation. He told me such a strange thing.
After getting rid of Tukhachevsky, Stalin suggested that Yegorov should occupy the deceased’s luxurious villa. But Yegorov shook his head and declined, saying.
“No, thanks! I, for one, am a bit superstitious ……”
However, Stalin would not spare either the prudent or the superstitious. At the end of 1938, Yegorov was suddenly removed from the important post of Deputy People’s Commissar of the Ministry of Defense, and then disappeared forever.
After many “purges”, there were few senior generals left in the Red Army, but Stalin did not stop there, he ordered the Ministry of Internal Affairs to continue arresting senior and middle-ranking cadres of the army one after another. This was a special precautionary measure he took. Stalin believed that the senior officers who had escaped the repression would not forget the tragic death of their comrades and would always fear the same fate for themselves. In Stalin’s words, this state of mind was “unhealthy emotions”. To eliminate this “unhealthy emotions”, Stalin believed that there was only one way – to eliminate the root of the problem, to kill.
The matter was not limited to the army. The wave of lawlessness and terror had swept across the country and into every sphere. It is simply unmanageable. The most frightening thing about this wave is that no one knows what it is all about. The victims engulfed by the new wave of repression. It is no longer the party opposition of yesteryear. Rather, they were people who had contributed to Stalin’s seizure of power, many of them even his closest comrades. Rumors of the “madman in the Kremlin” have reached the cadres of the party and beyond. The following is a brief list of those who were purged. You can see the extent of Stalin’s madness in eliminating his loyal comrades and in destroying his own state apparatus.
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