Why did Stalin purge the military?

One can define the various periods of Joseph Stalin’s killing machine in a number of ways. It would be nice to put them into mutually exclusive compartments. Alas, life doesn’t work like that and nor did Stalin. I’ve looked at it, pondered it, but alas I can’t do it.  Categories will necessarily overlap.

Let me share my preferences for a classification.  First round: Lenin’s associates. Second round: anyone who ever crossed Stalin’s path, or in any way belittled him. Third round: the military establishment. Fourth round: the Kremlin doctors, known also as “the Doctors’ Plot” or “Stalin’s last crime”

I have already written about the first two for TheArticle, here and here. This is the third round of mass killings, perhaps the most controversial one. It is difficult, indeed well-nigh impossible, to understand why Stalin destroyed the Soviet military machine just at the time when it was most needed — when that wanton destruction put the very existence of the Soviet Union in danger.

There is only one possible explanation. He believed that getting rid of rivals was more important than defence of the Soviet Union. He probably thought: “We managed in 1812, we shall manage this time as well. We are big. We have cold winters. They can’t occupy us.”

So what did Stalin do? He purged the military. The purge is described in detail in most books about Stalin. The best account is probably still The Great Terror by Robert Conquest, which has appeared in several editions.

Khrushchev’s so-called Secret Speech at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was almost immediately available from foreign radio stations. It was a bestseller. Not in the sense that everybody bought a copy (of course, there were no copies to buy), but in the sense that everybody talked about it.

I myself learned about it when travelling on my usual bus to my laboratory. A colleague of mine was an old friend who worked at the Hungarian Telegraphy Office (the official Hungarian News Agency). He saw me on the bus and was ready to give me the latest news. Everyone could hear it. He did not even lower his voice. He must have thought that the era of free speech has arrived.

For some reason his story started with the arrest of Marshal Tukhachevski, the Soviet representative at the funeral of George V, King of England. The Commander in Chief, Ian Gamarnik, got away by committing suicide. Marshal Blyucher was arrested just after he had expelled a Japanese incursion into the Soviet Union. That meant three marshals out of five were arrested – and shot. The other two were Budjenni and Voroshilov, Stalin’s comrades-in-arms at the time of the Civil War. They survived, the only examples I know of when Stalin saved his former associates.

Next, let us look at  some further victims among the military, detailed in Roy Medvedev’s important book Let History Judge. 14 out of 16 army commanders, 60 out of 67 corps commanders, 136 out of 199 divisional commanders, 221 out of 397 brigade commanders, 8 out of 8 admirals.

I think General Yakir, who was purged at the same time, should have some special mention. He was a military reformer, who realised that times had changed and with it military science has changed as well. He was not a theoretician, but wanted to put his ideas into practice. He conducted joint military manoeuvres with 65,000 men, including 1888 paratroopers, 12,000 tanks and 600 aircraft.

Some of Yakir’s innovations were copied into the German military code, sometime after the Locarno conference in 1925, which established closer contacts between the German and Soviet armies. In the 1920s and 1930s there were only two men in Europe, apart from Germany, who fully recognised the importance in warfare of mobile units: Yakir in the Soviet Union and De Gaulle in France. Neither had a chance to prepare their respective armies for the German onslaught.

In politics, by contrast, Yakir had no independent thoughts. He served Stalin loyally and, as commander of the Red Army in Ukraine, was willing to support all his repressive measures against the Ukrainians and Cossacks. Unfortunately, his loyalty to Stalin brought him no favours. He was tried and executed all the same.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was signed in August 1939. Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. Stalin had about 21 months to build up Soviet defences against the expected German attack. A very good thing would have been to do nothing, to refrain from destroying his own military forces. The next best thing would have been not to intervene in the military command. Stalin insisted on counterattack when his forces were unable to do so. All he achieved was the loss of manpower and equipment on an enormous scale when the Red Army was encircled, both in Ukraine and in Belarus. Still, Stalin’s armies triumphed in the end.

But we must recall that human life meant little to him, as his apocryphal quip abundantly shows: “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of a million is a statistic.” Even if he never actually made this infamous remark (it was coined by the German satirist Kurt Tucholsky), the fact that it was attributed to Stalin speaks volumes.

How his reputation will fare under Vladimir Putin’s rule is still uncertain. Will Stalin lose the limelight and will Putin take his place as the supreme commander during the greatest ever victory of the Russian Army? We don’t yet know. But we may not have long to wait.

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