- TIME
Eight of Red Russia’s top-rank fighting men stood on trial last week in a small, bare courtroom before an array of judges including Marshal Semion Mikhailovich Budenny and Vassily Jakovlevich Ulrich, president of the Military Colegium of the Soviet Supreme Court. The eight:
Marshal Mikhail Nikolaevich Tukhachevsky, until his demotion last month Vice Commissar for Defense, one of the greatest tacticians of the Red Army.
General A. I. Kork, until recently commandant of the Frunze Military Academy (Soviet West Point).
General Vitovta Kazimirovich Putna, military attache at London, Berlin, Tokyo.
General lona Emmanuilovich Yakir, displaced two days earlier as commandant of the Ukraine district.
General Robert Petrovich Eideman, recently removed as head of training of army reservists in aviation and chemical warfare.
General leronim Petrovich Uborevich, removed two days earlier as Red Army commander in the district of White Russia.
General B. M. Feldman, chief of the Administrative Board of the People’s Commissariat for Defense.
General V. M. Primakov of the Kharkov (Ukraine) military garrison.
The trial did not take long. The defendants, as is Communist custom, loudly pleaded guilty. Judge Ulrich gave out the verdict: “The court has established that the defendants were employed by the military secret service of a foreign government conducting an unfriendly policy against the Soviet Union. They . . . permitted wrecking acts intended to undermine the power of the Red Army and to prepare for . . . the defeat of the Red Army in event of an attack against it. … The special court session found all eight guilty of violating their military oath, of treason to the Red Army and of treason to the motherland and decided to deprive them of all military ranks and to sentence all of them to the highest measure of criminal punishment.”
Promptly then the big gold star was ripped from the cap of Marshal Tukhachevsky,the four red pips from the collars of his colleagues, and all eight of them fell dead before the acrid volleys of a firing squad. Official Pravda wrote their obituary: “Dogs die like dogs. There is no place for such murderers in the Soviet scheme of things.”
There was no attempt on the part of the Kremlin to suggest that any of the eight dead generals were Trotskyists. The charge was simply that they had sold information to a “foreign power.” Japan and Germany are the only two powers conceivably in the market for Russian military secrets, and of these Nazi Germany is closest to Moscow. Anti-Soviet rumor factories in Warsaw, Riga and Berlin quickly spread stories of abortive Red Army mutinies in a dozen districts, bloody street riots, even the assassination of Nazi Ambassador Friedrich Werner Graf von der Schulenburg.
Major significance of these executions was the Kremlin’s amazing confidence in its political equilibrium. Loss of the seven generals might be accepted by the Soviet masses as easily as the scores of Old Bolsheviks liquidated in the recent propaganda trials. But Marshal Tukhachevsky was a Red hero, until only one month ago high in Soviet good graces. Every Russian schoolboy has been taught his story: that he was the son of a provincial nobleman, serving in the Imperial Army, though always a Bolshevik at heart. They know that Marshal Tukhachevsky was captured by the Germans, escaping after fiveattempts in 1917; that he figured largely in the Civil War where his talents were promptly spotted by War Commissar Trotsky whom he helped build the Red Army. Every schoolboy also knows that it was Marshal Tukhachevsky who led Bolshevik troops in a great series of victories right to the gates of Warsaw, though few of them know much about the Battle of the Vistula, in which Tukhachevsky was soundly trounced by Poland’s Pilsudski with the shrewd backing of little Maxim Weygand of France.
Because the Bolshevik enthusiasm of Tukhachevsky and his fellow culprits was not questioned until very recently, the official charge that they had sold military secrets was not accepted in any informed quarter. Two conflicting explanations for the executions seemed equally valid: that Stalin had uncovered a plot in the high command of the Red Army to usurp his own political power; that Stalin, now turned conservative, is systematically doing away with all old-line Bolsheviks.
Pulitzer Prizeman Hubert R. Knickerbocker, longtime U. S. correspondent in Moscow and author of a number of books on Soviet Russia, had another explanation last week in the Hearstpapers:
As Nazi and Red armies grew in power and efficiency, their respective general staffs realized that a war between Russia and Germany might be suicidal for both countries. Secret conversations between them took place, and early this year German staff officers approached Adolf Hitler to suggest that a secret agreement with Russia would leave Germany free to concentrate on her old enemy France and the latter’s Central European allies.
There is nothing false about the Führer’s hatred and fear of Communism and all it stands for. Instantly he turned down the idea but visited no punishment on his soldiers. Secretive. Georgia-born Stalin does not take things so easily. When the scheme was brought to him by the Red generals, words were not enough to show his horror of any compromise with Fascism. He acted last week.
To this Knickerbocker theory other observers added a footnote. The Red Army’s commander, Klimentiy Voroshilov, is still Dictator Stalin’s most prized adviser. He is supposed to have struck a deal whereby he is to succeed Stalin on the latter’s death or incapacity. The price: restoration of Communist political committees to every district of the Red Army, thus preventing the latter from growing into a political machine by itself (TIME, May 31), and the lives of Voroshilov’s old comrades-in-arms who favored co-operation with Germany. Immediately after the executions last week “Klim” Voroshilov sent a message to all Red Army units:
“Tukhachevsky and other lackeys of capitalism have been abolished from the face of the earth, their memory to be cursed and forgotten.”
