Mikhail Tukhachevsky - The Reform of The Red Army

The Reform of The Red Army

According to Simon Sebag Montefiore, Joseph Stalin regarded Tukhachevsky as his bitterest rival and dubbed him Napoleonchik (little Napoleon). Upon Stalin's ascension to Party leadership in 1929, the Georgian began receiving denunciations from senior officers who disapproved of Tukhachevsky's tactical theories. Then, in 1930, the OGPU forced two officers to testify that Tukhachevsky was plotting to overthrow the Politburo via a coup d'état.

According to Montefiore,

In 1930, this was perhaps too outrageous even for the Bolsheviks. Stalin, not yet dictator, probed his powerful ally Sergo Ordzhonikidze: "Only Molotov, myself, and now you are in the know... Is it possible? What a business! Discuss it with Molotov..." However, Sergo would not go that far. There would be no arrest and trial of Tukhachevsky in 1930: the commander, "turns out to be 100% clean," Stalin wrote disingenuously to Molotov in October, "That's very good." It is interesting that seven years before the Great Terror, Stalin was testing the same accusations against the same victims -- a dress rehearsal for 1937 -- but he could not get the support. The archives reveal a fascinating sequel: once he understood the ambitious modernity of Tukhachevsky's strategies, Stalin apologised to him: "Now the question has become clearer to me, I have to agree that my remark was too strong and my conclusions were not right at all."

Following this, Tukhachevsky wrote several books on modern warfare and in 1931, after Stalin had accepted the need for an industrialized military, Tukhachevsky was given a leading role in reforming the army. He held advanced ideas on military strategy, particularly on the use of tanks and aircraft in combined operations.

Tukhachevsky took a keen interest in the arts, and during this period became a political patron and close friend of composer Dmitri Shostakovich: they met in 1925, and subsequently played music together at the Marshal's home (Tukhachevsky played the violin). In 1936, Shostakovich's music was under attack following the Pravda denunciation of his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. However, Tukhachevsky intervened with Stalin on his friend's behalf. After Tukhachevsky's arrest pressure was put on Shostakovich to denounce him, but he was saved from doing so by the fact that the investigator was himself arrested.