Background
The trial was preceded by several purges of the Red Army. In the mid-1920s, Leon Trotsky was removed as Commissar of War, and his known supporters were expunged from the military. Former tsarist 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".
Read more about this topic: Case Of Trotskyist Anti-Soviet Military Organization
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