Tukhachevskiy, Marshal Mikhail Nikolayevich (1893-1937), Russian and Soviet commander and military thinker. Born into down-at-heel Russian aristocracy, he graduated with the highest marks ever awarded from the Aleksandrovsk officer training school in 1914. A second lieutenant with the Semyonov Guards regiment, he was captured by the Germans in 1915 and spent two years as a prisoner. He escaped, returning just in time for the November 1917 Russian Revolution. He was not the only aristocrat ever to find revolution to his taste or advantage, probably realizing that the new Bolshevik government was then Russia's best hope, domestically and on the world stage.
In 1918 he joined the Communist party and was one of the voyenspets (military specialists) recruited into the Red Army. Trotsky personally picked him out from his post training troops in the Moscow district to command First Red Army in June 1918, and he led it in fighting in the Volga region, then in the Caucasus during the civil war from January to April 1920, and then in the Russo-Polish war from April to August 1920. His plan to take the Polish capital was a daring one, but the Red Army outpaced its logistics, suffering defeat at the hands of Pilsudksi before Warsaw. The 27-year-old Tukhachevskiy then put down the Kronstadt mutiny outside Petrograd (now St Petersburg) and returned to the Tambov region to finish off the ‘White’ counter-revolutionaries there. His views on dealing with ‘bandits’ were uncompromising: chemical weapons were recommended.
After the civil war he headed the Red Army Military ‘Academy’ (Staff or War College) and played an active part in the 1924-5 Frunze reforms. From 1925 to 1928 he was Red Army COS, beginning a period of far-reaching creative work on the character of future war and its impact on the armed forces' organization and technology. In the late 1920s Tukhachevskiy produced his massive study Future War; in 1931-2 New Questions of War, which was not published until 1962; and also, in 1931, the introduction to the Russian translation of J. F. C. Fuller's The Reformation of War (1923). In 1931 he became People's Commissar for Armaments, a post in which he was able to indulge his own inventiveness and passion for gadgets. His concept of ‘deep battle’ led him to sponsor the first large-scale experiments with paratroops, film of which made a big impact in the West in 1935 and 1936, and extraordinary ‘flying tanks’. He was fascinated by air power, particularly the long-range bombers being developed in the USA. Tukhachevskiy appears to have stolen many of his best ideas from Maj Gen Aleksandr Svechin (1878-1938), and then put him in prison. Tukhachevskiy, meanwhile, was made one of the first five marshals of the USSR in 1935, aged 42.
Tukhachevskiy appears schizophrenic. In 1928, German Gen Werner von Blomberg, who visited the Red Army as part of its co-operation with the Reichswehr, described him as ‘cultured, likeable, a person to note’. In 1936 the Soviet ambassador to London noted his diplomatic ability. A year later, the British secret service reported he was ‘noted for his taciturnity with foreigners … believed to be a cocaine addict’. He was artistic, made violins as a hobby, and, like Fuller, had an interest in the occult.
He represented the USSR at King George V's funeral in January 1936, and met senior British officers who were impressed by their first encounter with a Red marshal. But in May 1937 he was demoted and on 10 June arrested along with several others, accused of ‘anti-state connections with the leading military circles of a foreign power’—presumably Germany. On 12 June, after a brief trial, it was announced he had been shot, the start of Stalin's great purge of the Soviet army. After the advent of glasnost in the mid-1980s reports surfaced that he had secretly been kept alive until 1941, entirely possible given Soviet treatment of others accused of treason and espionage.
Bibliography
- Bellamy, Christopher, ‘Red Star in the West’, RUSI Journal (Dec. 1987).
- Erickson, John, The Soviet High Command 1918-1941 (London, 1968)
— Christopher Bellamy
