Hitler Moves East, 1941-1943 (37 page)

The revolution against the bourgeois world, just because of its ruthless challenge of the existing order, was in line with his own impetuous rejection of Western tradition, Christianity, and the European spirit. Tukhachevskiy's dreams were concerned with the East, not the West. He had seen the West in his POW camp. The West to him was the Tsar and his corrupt and decadent regime. The West and Tsarism, for whose restitution the Whites were fighting, were not Tukhachevskiy's party. To him the future of new ideas and a new power was in the East.

Moreover, on the side of the Reds there were great opportunities for the military ambitions of a young officer to whom the Army meant everything. Trotskiy, the creator of the Army of the Red Revolution, needed professional soldiers, leaders, and staff officers for his wild hordes. Tukhachevskiy therefore joined the Communist Party and became a general staff officer. In May 1918, at the age of twenty-five, he was Commander-in-Chief of the First Army. He threw the Czechoslovak legions back over the Volga. In 1919 he led the Fifth Army in the Urals. The Reds then controlled only one-sixth of the Russian empire. Things looked bad for Lenin. But Tukhachevskiy defeated Admiral Kolchak's White divisions which had got as far as Kazan and chased them over the Urals. In 1920 he drove General Denikin's White southern army into the Black Sea.

Just then the young Soviet Union was facing its greatest military threat. The Poles, taking advantage of Russia's weakness, burst into the Ukraine, occupied Kiev, and presently controlled the grain areas of the starving young Soviet State. Once again Tukhachevskiy was the saviour. He outmanoeuvred the Poles by a brilliant operation. They were forced to withdraw. Tukhachevskiy pressed after them and marched on Warsaw. He advanced towards the West.

Would Warsaw be the first stage in the victorious advance of the Red revolution into Europe?

Marshal Pilsudski writes in his memoirs that the fate of Poland had then seemed to him gloomy and hopeless. But not till twenty-four years later did the Red Army in fact get to Warsaw and into Europe. Then, in the summer of 1920, the Poles and Europe generally were saved from Lenin's banner by "the miracle on the Vistula." But this miracle was no accomplishment of Europe; it was the result of Josef Stalin's stupidity and disobedience.

Tukhachevskiy was within artillery range of Warsaw. The Revolutionary War Council in Moscow, the supreme authority of the Red Army, invested him with the Supreme Command of all armed forces on the Western front, including the South-western Army, whose cavalry units were commanded by Yegorov and Budennyy. The political commissar of the South-western Army was Josef Stalin. Tukhachevskiy gave the correct order to the South-western Army—to wheel towards the north, towards Lublin, so as to cover the flank of his striking army aiming at Warsaw.

But Josef Stalin had different ideas. He wanted to capture Lvov. He talked the two commanders, Budennyy and Voro- shilov, into ignoring Tukhachevskiy's order and into marching not against Lublin but against Lvov. This they did. The French General Weygand, who was the adviser of Pilsudski, the Polish Commander-in-Chief, realized his chance.

Through the gap the Poles struck at Tukhachevskiy's left flank and rolled up the wing of his army. Panic broke out. The troops fled. Poland was saved.

It is not difficult to guess what sentiments Tukhachevskiy nurtured for Stalin since those days. If nevertheless he was promoted, under the dictator's rule, to the rank of marshal and to the post of Chief of the General Staff and then Deputy War Minister, this is evidence of his self-control and his military abilities which Stalin could not do without.

The creation of a modern Red Army, above all its motorization and the introduction of armour, was the work of Tukhachevskiy. His avowed model was the Chief of the German Reichswehr, Colonel-General von Seeckt. Seeckt the Prussian and Tukhachevskiy the revolutionary general—were they not like fire and water? Naturally, the two were divided by a whole world, but there was also a lot that they had in common. Stalin's system of spies within the Army, a system which was like a cancer on the morale of the Officers Corps, and the dictator's economic experiments, with their collectivization and slaughter of the peasants, had turned Tukhachevskiy into a bitter enemy of Stalinism. But the decisive motive for his political opposition, presumably, was Stalin's foreign policy. Tukhachevskiy became increasingly convinced that an alliance between Germany and the Soviet Union was an inescapable commandment of history, so that the struggle could be waged against the "decadent West."

Tukhachevskiy knew, of course, that this aim could only be reached against Stalin and his narrow-minded bureaucracy. He therefore had to be armed for the event of a clash. His private army was the Khabarovsk Corps.

Since 1935 Tukhachevskiy had maintained a kind of revolutionary committee in Khabarovsk, the centre of Eastern Siberia. Its members included senior administrative officials and Army commanders, but also some young Party functionaries in high posts, such as the Party leader in the Northern Caucasus, Boris Sheboldayev. This composition is important. It proves that Tukhachevskiy was not out to create an anti-Communist movement, but to mobilize the progressive and patriotic wing of the Bolsheviks against Stalin's tyranny.

In the spring of 1936 Tukhachevskiy went to London as the leader of the Soviet delegation attending the funeral of King George V. Both his outward and homeward journeys led him through Berlin. He used the opportunity for talks with leading German generals. He wanted to make sure that Germany would not use any possible revolutionary unrest in the Soviet Union as a pretext for marching against the East. What mattered to him most was his idea of a German- Russian alliance after the overthrow of Stalin. What evidence is there for this?

Geoffrey Bailey in his above-mentioned book quotes an attested remark by Tukhachevskiy, made at about that time to the Rumanian Foreign Minister Titulescu. Tukhachevskiy said: "You are wrong to tie the fate of your country to

countries which are old and finished, such as France and Britain. We ought to turn towards the new Germany. For some time at least Germany will assume the leading position on the continent of Europe."

That was in the spring of 1936. The date is important. For nine months later Skoblin, the OGPU agent in Paris, arranged for information about the Red generals' imminent coup against Stalin to fall into the hands of the contacts of SS Gruppenführer Heydrich. Hitler believed that here was his chance to deliver the Red Napoleon to his executioners and deprive the Soviet Army of its head. But in reality Heydrich was merely doing Stalin's work for him. The dictator had long decided to act against Tukhachevskiy.

Here is the proof. In January 1937 Prosecutor General Vy-shinskiy, the Soviet Grand Inquisitor, opened the political purge trial of the old anti-Stalin Bolshevik Guard in the great hall of the former Nobles' Club in Moscow.

The main figure in the dock was Karl Radek, the man who, between 1919 and 1921, had arranged the collaboration between the Reichswehr and the Red Army. He was now to be the man to bring it to its end. At the morning session of 24th January he suddenly introduced Tukhachevskiy's name in reply to a question fired at him by Vyshinskiy. The name came up quite casually. Vyshinskiy probed a little further. And Radek said, "Naturally Tukhachevskiy had no idea of the criminal part I was playing."

An icy silence descended over the court room. And in this silence Radek muttered the name of one of Tukhachevskiy's confidants, General Putna. "Putna was my fellow conspirator," Radek confessed. But Putna was the foreign affairs expert of the Tukhachevskiy group, and had made numerous contacts as Military Attache in Berlin, London, and Tokyo. What was more, Putna was already under arrest at the time of the hearing. He had been arrested towards the end of 1936.

Thus the moves against Tukhachevskiy had been taking place quietly since the end of 1936. Naturally, the Marshal and his friends realized their danger. Supposing Putna talked? It did not bear thinking of. Swift action was necessary.

In March 1937 the race between Tukhachevskiy and Stalin's secret agents was becoming increasingly dramatic. Like the rumble of an approaching storm was Stalin's remark at a meeting of the Central Committee, at which Tukhachevskiy himself was present: "There are spies and enemies of the State in the ranks of the Red Army."

Why did the Marshal not act then? Why was he still hesitating? The answer is simple enough. The moves of General Staff officers and Army commanders, whose headquarters were often thousands of miles apart, were difficult to co- ordinate, especially as their strict surveillance by the secret police forced them to act with the utmost caution. The coup against Stalin was fixed for the 1st of May 1937, mainly because the May Day Parades would make it possible to move substantial troop contingents to Moscow without arousing suspicion.

However, chance or Stalin's cunning brought about a postponement. It was announced from the Kremlin that Marshal Tukhachevskiy would lead the Soviet delegation to London to attend the coronation of King George VI on 12th May 1937. Tukhachevskiy was to be reassured. And he was reassured. He postponed the coup by three weeks. That was his fatal mistake. He did not go to London, and the coup did not take place. About 25th April he was seen at the Spring Ball at the Moscow Officers Club. On 28th April he attended a reception at the US Embassy. That was his last reliably attested public appearance. Everything that happened afterwards is known only from rumours and unverifiable second- and third-hand reports.

The last official announcement about the Marshal was the Tass report of llth June 1937, announcing that Tukhachev- skiy and seven other generals had been arrested, sentenced, and shot. General Gamarnik was reported to have committed suicide. In fact, he was beaten to death during interrogation. A large number of stories circulated about the trial and the execution. Nearest the truth, probably, is the version to the effect that a hearing took place with Vyshinskiy as prosecutor. Marshals Blyukher and Budennyy, as well as other senior generals, were members of the tribunal. No witnesses were called. Vyshinskiy needed no witnesses: his surprise move was the submission of the faked-up Reichswehr file supplied by Heydrich. To Stalin and the Party these papers were evidence of the espionage conducted by Tukhachevskiy and his friends. The documents, moreover, made it impossible for the senior generals and marshals to do anything for the conspirators. The first breach was torn in the solid front of the generals. They sat in judgment over their comrades, and in the eyes of the rest became culpable themselves. Each evil deed begot another.

Before long Tukhachevskiy's judges were in the dock facing new judges, and the new executioners presently faced newer executioners still. Thus it went on.

There is no evidence to show whether Tukhachevskiy and his seven fellow-accused were present at the main trial, or, indeed, whether they were still alive then. A reliable witness, the NKVD official Shpigelglass, quotes the Deputy OGPU Chief at the time, Frinovskiy, for the remark: "The entire Soviet regime hung by a thread. It was impossible to proceed as in normal times—to have the trial first and the execution afterwards. In this case we had to shoot first and sentence afterwards."

And how was Tukhachevskiy done to death—the man who had done more to save Lenin's revolution than Stalin and all his henchmen together? That too is not known for certain. Most probably he was shot from behind with an eight- round automatic pistol in the tiled cellars of the Lubyanka prison and flung into a mass grave with his comrades.

Day after day and week after week the mass graves grew. Stalin decimated the corps of General Staff officers, he executed the experienced commanders, and, above all, he wrecked the military discipline which Tukhachevskiy had so laboriously built up by now enthroning the political commissars and consolidating the Party's control over the Army.

The settling of accounts came two years later, in the winter of 1939-40. Three months after Hitler's attack on Poland Stalin mounted a "punitive expedition" against his small neighbour Finland. The Soviets had demanded the cession of the Hangö Peninsula in the southwestern part of the Gulf of Finland "for the protection of Leningrad and Kronshtadt." When the Finnish Government refused Moscow replied with the complaint that Finnish artillery had shelled the Soviet frontier village of Mainila.

The Finns guessed Stalin's intention. They offered to conduct a joint inquiry. Stalin's answer was a full-scale attack on land, on the sea, and in the air. The notorious Finnish-Russian winter war had begun. However, it soon took a different course from the one envisaged by Stalin and his military advisers. Stalin had pictured a Blitzkrieg on the model of his ally Adolf Hitler. What ensued instead was a savage and costly campaign with shameful Soviet defeats which amazed the world and which were to have a disastrous effect on world history.

To this day one still encounters the theory that Stalin deliberately waged his war against Finland with weak and poorly equipped troops in order to deceive Germany. But that is a fairy-tale.

Russia attacked with its Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Armies. A force of 150,000 to 200,000 troops faced the 700,000 Soviet troops. Nevertheless the Soviets were defeated. The Red Army displayed poor tactics, worse strategy, and an appalling fighting morale. These were the consequences of the purges.