Stalin's Purge of the Soviet Military

The following is the text to the YouTube video called "Stalin's Purge of the Soviet Military."

In May 1937, Marshal Tukhachevsky and Commanders Yakir, Uborevich, Eideman, Kork, Putna, Feldman, and Primakov were arrested. They had been under suspicion since the beginning of that month. Earlier in May, the Commissar system, used during the Civil War, was restored. This reflected the fear of Bonapartist tendencies within the army.

When German officer Blomberg visited the USSR in 1928, he found that, in his own words, “Purely military points of view step more and more into the foreground; everything else is subordinated to them.”

In 1930, ten percent of the Soviet officer corps was made up of former Czarist officers. Many soldiers had come from the countryside, where Kulak (landed, upper peasant) influence was still strong. So counter-revolutionary views were pretty strong in the Soviet military.

The French Deuxieme Bureau told journalist Alexander Werth that Tukhachevsky was pro-German. Czech officials told Werth that Tukhachevsky, on a visit to Prague, got drunk and said that an agreement with Hitler was the only hope for Czechoslovakia and Russia, and then he went on to verbally abuse Stalin. In the book “The Reign of Stalin” it was stated that Tukhachevsky spoke highly of the British Army and how Britain’s soldiers and people kept themselves subordinate to the British government.

US Ambassador to Moscow, Joseph Davies, said in 1937 that there was, indeed, a plot for a coup d’etat. This coup wasn’t necessarily anti-Stalin, but it was anti-political and anti-party according to Davies.

Robert Coulondre, French Ambassador to Moscow, said that the Lithuanian Minister had told him there was a plot to install a military dictatorship after the coup against Stalin.

Trotskyist author Isaac Deutscher once said, “All the non-Stalinist variants do concur the following: that the generals did indeed plan a coup d’etat.” Yakir, Uborevich, Kork, and Primakov were also in the plot according to him.

In the March 25, 1937 issue of a Paris Menshevik newspaper, the Socialist Courier, they wrote, "There is no question that the Germans have managed to have their agents in the U.S.S.R. penetrate the most responsible positions."

In his diary, Gobbels, a top Nazi official, wrote about some comments from Hitler on the case of a conspiracy in the Red Army. He basically said that Stalin had strengthened the Red Army be getting rid of defeatist and opposition currents within it. Who would know better about the strength of the Soviet Army than those who had to fight against it?

Kolkowicz, who was conducting a study for the US Army, said that, “Stalin embarked on a massive program that was intended to provide the Soviet Army with modern weapons, equipment and logistics. But he remained wary of the military’s tendency towards elitism and exclusiveness.”

Soviet General Vlasov played an important role in defending Moscow in 1941. He was captured by the Germans in 1942, and he decided to offer his services to Germany. After an interview with Himmler in 1944, he was allowed to create a pro-Nazi army in Russia called the Russian Liberation Army. Vlasov also called for an army free from Party control that was staffed with elitist professionals.

Other captured Soviet officers also stabbed the USSR in the back. To name a few, Major Generals Trukhin, Malyshkin, and Zakutny. There were many others who I didn’t name.

Then there was Soviet colonel G.A Tokaev who defected to the UK in 1948. He wrote a book called “Comrade X” where he admitted that he was part of an anti-communist organization within the military. He had joined it as early as 1933. At the head of the organization, he admits, there was a member of the Bolshevik Central Committee. The colonel considered the UK to be the most free and democratic country in the world!

Nazis had infiltrated many governments and militaries throughout Europe, including in France and Romania. To argue that there was no Nazi infiltration in the USSR, and that such a thing was impossible, is to ignore history and reality.

In short, the purge was justified and necessary to preserve socialism.

Source:
“Another View of Stalin” by Ludo Martens
“MIM Theory 6: The Stalin Issue” published by MIM