Case of Trotskyist Anti-Soviet Military Organization
Encyclopedia
The Case of Trotskyist Anti-Soviet Military Organization ( or "дело антисоветской троцкистской военной организации", also known as the "Military Case" or the "Tukhachevsky Case") was a 1937 secret trial of the high command of the Red Army
, orchestrated by Joseph Stalin
as part of the Great Purge
.
, 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. 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 over 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 purge
s that followed.
The trial triggered a massive subsequent purge of the Red Army
. In September 1938 the People's Commissar for Defense, Kliment Voroshilov
, reported that a total of 37,761 officers and commissar
s were dismissed from the army, 10,868 were arrested and 7,211 were condemned for anti-Soviet crimes.
was removed as Commissar of War, and his known supporters were expunged from the military. Former tsar
ist 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 Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
(CPSU), 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".
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 Nazi 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. 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. 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. Joseph 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.
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. Tukhachevsky and his fellow defendants were probably tortured into confessions.
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 confession
s, in many cases obtained with the aid of physical violence.
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.
At first it was thought 25-50% of Red Army officers were purged, it is now known to be 3.7-7.7%. Previously, the size of the Red Army officer corp was underestimated and it was overlooked that most of those purged were merely expelled from the Party. 30% of officers purged 1937-9 were allowed back.
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.
'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.
Red Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army started out as the Soviet Union's revolutionary communist combat groups during the Russian Civil War of 1918-1922. It grew into the national army of the Soviet Union. By the 1930s the Red Army was among the largest armies in history.The "Red Army" name refers to...
, orchestrated by Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
as part of the Great Purge
Great Purge
The Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin from 1936 to 1938...
.
Defendants
The Case of Military was a secret trialSecret trial
A secret trial is a trial that is not open to the public, nor generally reported in the news, especially any in-trial proceedings. Generally no official record of the case or the judge's verdict is made available. Often there is no indictment...
, unlike the Moscow Show Trials
Moscow Trials
The Moscow Trials were a series of show trials conducted in the Soviet Union and orchestrated by Joseph Stalin during the Great Purge of the 1930s. The victims included most of the surviving Old Bolsheviks, as well as the leadership of the Soviet secret police...
. However, it was a sham in that its outcome was predetermined. Former Soviet government official and Stalin Terror survivor Alexander Barmine
Alexander Barmine
Alexander Gregory Barmine was an officer in the Soviet Army who fled the purges of the Joseph Stalin era. After settling in France, he later moved to the United States where he enlisted in the U.S. Army as a private during World War II as an anti-aircraft gunner, later joining the Office of...
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. 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
Great Purge
The Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin from 1936 to 1938...
. Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky
Mikhail Tukhachevsky
Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevsky was a Marshal of the Soviet Union, commander in chief of the Red Army , and one of the most prominent victims of Joseph Stalin's Great Purge.-Early life:...
and the senior military officers Iona Yakir
Iona Yakir
Iona Emmanuilovich Yakir was the Red Army commander and one of the world's major military reformers between World War I and World War II.-Early years:...
, Ieronim Uborevich
Ieronim Uborevich
Ieronim Petrovich Uborevich was a Soviet military commander of the Red Army during the Russian Civil War, and eventually attained the rank of Army Commander, 1st Rank, equivalent to General of the Army after old Imperial ranks were reintroduced in 1940....
, Robert Eideman, August Kork, Vitovt Putna
Vitovt Putna
Vitovt Kazimirovich Putna was a Soviet Red Army officer of Lithuanian origin. A World War I veteran of the Imperial Russian Army and Bolshevik since 1917, Putna was a komdiv during the Polish-Soviet War and commanded a variety of divisions...
, Boris Feldman and Vitaly Primakov (as well as Yakov Gamarnik
Yakov Gamarnik
Jankel Borysovych Pukhdykovych , better known as Jan Gamarnik or Yakov Gamarnik was a Soviet politician of Jewish ethnicity.-Biography:...
, 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
Supreme Court of the USSR
The Supreme Court of the USSR was the supreme court of the Soviet Union during its existence. The Supreme Court of the USSR included the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR and other elements which were not typical of Supreme Courts found in other countries, then or now.-See also:*...
. The Tribunal was presided over by Vasili Ulrikh
Vasili Ulrikh
Vasiliy Vasilievich Ulrikh was a senior judge of the Soviet Union during most of the regime of Joseph Stalin. In this capacity, Ulrikh served as the presiding judge at many of the major show trials of the Great Purges in the Soviet Union.-Early life:Vasili Ulrikh was born in Riga, Latvia, then a...
and included marshals Vasily Blyukher
Vasily Blyukher
Vasily Konstantinovich Blyukher Vasily Konstantinovich Blyukher Vasily Konstantinovich Blyukher (also spelled Bliukher, Blücher, etc., , Soviet military commander, was among the prominent victims of Joseph Stalin's Great Purge of the late 1930s....
, Semyon Budyonny
Semyon Budyonny
Semyon Mikhailovich Budyonny , sometimes transliterated as Budennyj, Budyonnyy, Budennii, Budenny, Budyoni, Budyenny, or Budenny, was a Soviet cavalryman, military commander, politician and a close ally of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.-Early life:...
and Army Commanders Yakov Alksnis
Yakov Alksnis
Yakov Ivanovich Alksnis was the commander of Red Army Air Forces in 1931–1937.Jēkabs Alksnis was born in a farmer's family in Naukšēni parish, Vidzeme . He attended school in Ramnieki and a teachers seminary in Valmiera , where he joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party...
, Boris Shaposhnikov
Boris Shaposhnikov
Boris Mikhailovitch Shaposhnikov was a Soviet military commander.-Biography:Shaposhnikov was born at Zlatoust, near Chelyabinsk in the Urals. He joined the army of the Russian Empire in 1901 and graduated from the Nicholas General Staff Academy in 1910, reaching the rank of colonel in the...
, Ivan Belov
Ivan Belov
Ivan Mikhailovich Belov was a Soviet officer and naval captain. He was a victim of the Helsinki Lauttasaari event on November 3, 1944. He is the subject of a Finnish play, Matkalla Porkkalaan....
, Pavel Dybenko
Pavel Dybenko
Pavel Efimovich Dybenko was a Russian revolutionary and a leading Soviet officer.- Until the military service :...
, and Nikolai Kashirin. Only Ulrikh, Budyonny and Shaposhnikov would survive the purge
Purge
In history, religion, and political science, a purge is the removal of people who are considered undesirable by those in power from a government, from another organization, or from society as a whole. Purges can be peaceful or violent; many will end with the imprisonment or exile of those purged,...
s that followed.
The trial triggered a massive subsequent purge of the Red Army
Red Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army started out as the Soviet Union's revolutionary communist combat groups during the Russian Civil War of 1918-1922. It grew into the national army of the Soviet Union. By the 1930s the Red Army was among the largest armies in history.The "Red Army" name refers to...
. In September 1938 the People's Commissar for Defense, Kliment Voroshilov
Kliment Voroshilov
Kliment Yefremovich Voroshilov , popularly known as Klim Voroshilov was a Soviet military officer, politician, and statesman...
, reported that a total of 37,761 officers and commissar
Commissar
Commissar is the English transliteration of an official title used in Russia from the time of Peter the Great.The title was used during the Provisional Government for regional heads of administration, but it is mostly associated with a number of Cheka and military functions in Bolshevik and Soviet...
s were dismissed from the army, 10,868 were arrested and 7,211 were condemned for anti-Soviet crimes.
Background
The trial was preceded by several purges of the Red Army. In the mid-1920s, Leon TrotskyLeon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky , born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army....
was removed as Commissar of War, and his known supporters were expunged from the military. Former tsar
Tsar
Tsar is a title used to designate certain European Slavic monarchs or supreme rulers. As a system of government in the Tsardom of Russia and Russian Empire, it is known as Tsarist autocracy, or Tsarism...
ist 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 Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
The Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union , abbreviated in Russian as ЦК, "Tse-ka", earlier was also called as the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party ...
(CPSU), at which Vyacheslav Molotov
Vyacheslav Molotov
Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov was a Soviet politician and diplomat, an Old Bolshevik and a leading figure in the Soviet government from the 1920s, when he rose to power as a protégé of Joseph Stalin, to 1957, when he was dismissed from the Presidium of the Central Committee by Nikita Khrushchev...
called for more thorough exposure of "wreckers
Wrecking (Soviet crime)
Wrecking , was a crime specified in the criminal code of the Soviet Union in the Stalin era. It is often translated as "sabotage"; however "wrecking" and "diversionist acts" and "counter-revolutionary sabotage" were distinct sub-articles of Article 58 , and the meaning of "wrecking" is closer to...
" within the Red Army, since they "had already been found in all segments of the Soviet economy".
Evidence, arrest, and secret trial
General Mikhail TukhachevskyMikhail Tukhachevsky
Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevsky was a Marshal of the Soviet Union, commander in chief of the Red Army , and one of the most prominent victims of Joseph Stalin's Great Purge.-Early life:...
was arrested on May 22, 1937 and charged, along with seven other Red Army commanders, with the creation of a "right-wing-Trotskyist
Trotskyism
Trotskyism is the theory of Marxism as advocated by Leon Trotsky. Trotsky considered himself an orthodox Marxist and Bolshevik-Leninist, arguing for the establishment of a vanguard party of the working-class...
" military conspiracy and espionage
Espionage
Espionage or spying involves an individual obtaining information that is considered secret or confidential without the permission of the holder of the information. Espionage is inherently clandestine, lest the legitimate holder of the information change plans or take other countermeasures once it...
for Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...
, 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
Abwehr
The Abwehr was a German military intelligence organisation from 1921 to 1944. The term Abwehr was used as a concession to Allied demands that Germany's post-World War I intelligence activities be for "defensive" purposes only...
, 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. At Stalin's order, the NKVD
NKVD
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs was the public and secret police organization of the Soviet Union that directly executed the rule of power of the Soviets, including political repression, during the era of Joseph Stalin....
instructed one of its agents, Nikolai Skoblin
Nikolai Skoblin
Nikolai Skoblin was a general in the counterrevolutionary White Russian army, a member of the expatriate Russian All-Military Union , a Soviet double agent, and husband to the gypsy folk-singer Nadezhda Plevitskaya ....
, to pass to Reinhard Heydrich
Reinhard Heydrich
Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich , also known as The Hangman, was a high-ranking German Nazi official.He was SS-Obergruppenführer and General der Polizei, chief of the Reich Main Security Office and Stellvertretender Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia...
, chief of the German Nazi SD (Sicherheitsdienst
Sicherheitsdienst
Sicherheitsdienst , full title Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsführers-SS, or SD, was the intelligence agency of the SS and the Nazi Party in Nazi Germany. The organization was the first Nazi Party intelligence organization to be established and was often considered a "sister organization" with the...
) intelligence arm, concocted information suggesting a plot by Tukhachevsky and the other Soviet generals against Stalin. Seeing an opportunity to strike a blow at both the Soviet Union and his arch-enemy Admiral Canaris of the German Abwehr
Abwehr
The Abwehr was a German military intelligence organisation from 1921 to 1944. The term Abwehr was used as a concession to Allied demands that Germany's post-World War I intelligence activities be for "defensive" purposes only...
, 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. Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
'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.
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 confession
Forced confession
A forced confession is a confession obtained by a suspect or a prisoner under means of torture, enhanced interrogation technique or duress.Depending on the level of coercion used, a forced confession may or may not be valid in revealing the truth...
s, in many cases obtained with the aid of physical violence.
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
Red Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army started out as the Soviet Union's revolutionary communist combat groups during the Russian Civil War of 1918-1922. It grew into the national army of the Soviet Union. By the 1930s the Red Army was among the largest armies in history.The "Red Army" name refers to...
command can be seen as a preemptive move by Stalin and Nikolai Yezhov
Nikolai Yezhov
Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov or Ezhov was a senior figure in the NKVD under Joseph Stalin during the period of the Great Purge. His reign is sometimes known as the "Yezhovshchina" , "the Yezhov era", a term that began to be used during the de-Stalinization campaign of the 1950s...
, People's Commissar of State Security, to eliminate a potential rival and source of opposition to their planned purge of the nomenklatura
Nomenklatura
The nomenklatura were a category of people within the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries who held various key administrative positions in all spheres of those countries' activity: government, industry, agriculture, education, etc., whose positions were granted only with approval by the...
. 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.
At first it was thought 25-50% of Red Army officers were purged, it is now known to be 3.7-7.7%. Previously, the size of the Red Army officer corp was underestimated and it was overlooked that most of those purged were merely expelled from the Party. 30% of officers purged 1937-9 were allowed back.
Another suggestion is that Tukhachevsky and others did indeed try to conspire against Stalin. Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky , born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army....
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
Stalin's antisemitism
Though communist leader Joseph Stalin initially denounced antisemitism, numerous instances of Stalin's antisemitism, manifested in the executions and deportations of Jews, have been witnessed by contemporaries and documented by historical sources....
. Half of the accused were Jews
Jews
The Jews , also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and ethnoreligious group originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation...
: 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.
Speedy inquest
Vadim RogovinVadim Rogovin
Vadim Zakharovich Rogovin was a Russian Marxist historian and sociologist, Ph.D. in philosophy, Leading Researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, an author of the 6-volume study of Stalin era between 1923 and 1940, with the emphasis on the Trotskyist...
'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
Admission (law)
An admission in the law of evidence is a prior statement by an adverse party which can be admitted into evidence over a hearsay objection. In general, admissions are admissible in criminal and civil cases.At common law, admissions were admissible...
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
Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee
The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was formed on Joseph Stalin's order in Kuibyshev in April 1942 with the official support of the Soviet authorities...
, 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.
Sources
- "Известия ЦК КПСС" ("Izvestiya TseKa KPSS" - Reports of the Central CommitteeCentral CommitteeCentral Committee was the common designation of a standing administrative body of communist parties, analogous to a board of directors, whether ruling or non-ruling in the twentieth century and of the surviving, mostly Trotskyist, states in the early twenty first. In such party organizations the...
of the CPSUCommunist Party of the Soviet UnionThe Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the only legal, ruling political party in the Soviet Union and one of the largest communist organizations in the world...
), #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 SuvorovViktor SuvorovViktor Suvorov is the pen name for Vladimir Bogdanovich Rezun , a former Soviet and now British writer of Russian and Ukrainian descent who writes primarily in Russian, as well as a former Soviet military intelligence spy who defected to the UK...
, free Russian full text - List of accused