Mikhail Tukhachevsky - Aftermath

Aftermath

Tukhachevsky's family members all suffered after his execution. His wife Nina Tukhachevskaya, as well as his brothers Alexandr and Nikolai (both were instructors in a Soviet military academy) were all shot. Three of his sisters were sent to the Gulag. His under-aged daughter was arrested when she reached adult age and remained in the camps until the Khrushchev thaw. She lived in Moscow after her release and died in 1982.

Prior to Nikita Khrushchev's Secret Speech in 1956, Marshal Tukhachevsky was officially considered a Fascist Fifth Columnist. Soviet diplomats and apologists in the West enthusiastically promulgated this opinion. Then, on January 31, 1957, Tukhachevsky and his co-defendants were declared innocent of all charges and were "rehabilitated."

Although Tukhachevsky's prosecution is almost universally regarded as a sham, Stalin's motivations continue to be debated. In his 1968 book The Great Terror, British historian Robert Conquest accuses Nazi Party leaders Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich of forging documents which implicated Tukhachevsky in an anti-Stalinist conspiracy with the Wehrmacht General Staff. This was done because Himmler and Heydrich wished to weaken the Soviet Union's defence capacity. These documents, Conquest said, were leaked to President Edvard Beneš of Czechoslovakia, who passed them to Soviet Russia through diplomatic channels. Conquest's thesis of an SS conspiracy to frame Tukhachevsky was based upon the memoirs of Walter Schellenberg and Edvard Beneš.

In 1989, the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union announced that new evidence had been found in Stalin's archives indicating German intelligence intentions to fabricate disinformation about Tukhachevsky with intention to eliminate him. "Materials of foreign intelligence agencies at important level, also personal characteristics of Stalin like morbid suspiciousness and extreme suspicion had been possibly highest factor in it."

However, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union it became clear that Stalin, Kaganovich, and Yezhov had actually concocted Tukhachevsky's "treason" themselves. At Yezhov's order, the NKVD had instructed a known double agent, Nikolai Skoblin, to leak to Reinhard Heydrich's Sicherheitsdienst concocted information suggesting a plot by Tukhachevsky and the other Soviet generals against Stalin.

Seeing an opportunity to strike a blow at the Soviet military, Heydrich immediately acted on the information and undertook to improve on it. Heydrich's forgeries were later leaked to the Soviets via Beneš and other neutral nations. While the SD believed it had successfully fooled Stalin into executing his best generals, in reality it had merely served as unwitting pawns of the Soviet NKVD. Ironically, Heydrich's forgeries were never used at trial. Instead Soviet prosecutors relied on signed "confessions" which had been beaten out of the defendants.

In 1956, NKVD defector Alexander Orlov published an article in Life Magazine entitled, The Sensational Secret Behind the Damnation of Stalin. This story held that NKVD agents had discovered papers in the Tsarist Okhrana archives which proved Stalin had once been an informer. On the basis of this knowledge, the NKVD agents had planned a coup d'état with Marshal Tukhachevsky and other senior officers in the Red Army. According to Orlov, Stalin uncovered the conspiracy and used Yezhov to execute those responsible.

Simon Sebag Montefiore, who has conducted extensive research in Soviet archives, states,

"Stalin needed neither Nazi disinformation nor mysterious Okhrana files to persuade him to destroy Tukhachevsky. After all, he had played with the idea as early as 1930, three years before Hitler took power. Furthermore, Stalin and his cronies were convinced that officers were to be distrusted and physically exterminated at the slightest suspicion. He reminisced to Voroshilov, in an undated note, about the officers arrested in the summer of 1918. 'These officers,' he said, 'we wanted to shoot en masse.' Nothing had changed."

According to Montefiore, Stalin had always known that the Red Army was the only institution which could have resisted his quest for absolute power. Stalin's paranoia about internal subversion and belief in his own infallible ability to detect traitors did the rest. Stalin, Yezhov, and Marshall Voroshilov orchestrated the arrest and execution of thousands of Soviet military officers after Tukhachevsky was shot. Ultimately, five out of the eight generals who presided over Tukhachevsky's "trial" were arrested and shot by the NKVD.

According to Montefiore, Stalin's close friend and confidant Lazar Kaganovich later joked, "Tukhachevsky hid Napoleon's baton in his rucksack."