Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevsky (; – 12 June 1937), nicknamed the Red Napoleon, was a Soviet general who was prominent between 1918 and 1937 as a military officer and theoretician. He was later executed during the Moscow trials of 1936–1938.
He served as an officer in World War I of 1914–1917 and in the Russian Civil War of 1917–1923, leading the defense of the Moscow district (1918), commanding forces on the Eastern Front (1918), commanding the Fifth Army in the recapture of Siberia from Alexander Kolchak, and heading Cossack forces against Anton Denikin (1920). From 1920 to 1921 he commanded the Soviet Western Front in the Polish–Soviet War. Soviet forces under his command successfully repelled the Polish forces from Western Ukraine, driving them back into Poland, but the Red Army suffered defeat outside of Warsaw, and the war ended in a Soviet defeat. Tukhachevsky blamed Joseph Stalin for his defeat at the Battle of Warsaw.
He later served as Chief of Staff of the Red Army from 1925 to 1928, as assistant in the People's Commissariat of Defense after 1934 and as commander of the Volga Military District in 1937. He achieved the rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union in 1935.
As a major proponent of modernisation of Soviet armament and army force structure in the 1920s and 1930s, he became instrumental in the development of Soviet aviation, and of mechanized and airborne forces. As a theoretician, he was a driving force behind the Soviet development of the theory of deep operations in the 1920s and 1930s. Soviet authorities accused Tukhachevsky of treason, and after he confessed during torture, he was executed in 1937 during the military purges of 1936–1938, led by Stalin and Nikolai Yezhov.
Early life
Tukhachevsky was born at Alexandrovskoye, Safonovsky District (in the present-day Smolensk Oblast of Russia), into a family of impoverished hereditary nobles. Legend states that his family descended from a Flemish count who ended up stranded in the East during the Crusades and took a Turkish wife before settling in Russia.Norman Davies, White Eagle, Red Star: The Polish-Soviet War 1919–20, p. 130. His great-grandfather Alexander Tukhachevsky (1793–1831) served as a colonel in the Imperial Russian Army. He was of Russian ethnicity. After attending the Cadet Corps in 1912, he moved on to the , where he graduated in 1914.
World War I At the outset of the First World War, he joined the Semyenovsky Guards Regiment (July 1914) as a second lieutenant, declaring:
I am convinced that all that is needed in order to achieve what I want is bravery and self-confidence. I certainly have enough self-confidence.... I told myself that I shall either be a general at thirty, or that I shall not be alive by then.
Taken prisoner by the Imperial German Army in February 1915, Tukhachevsky escaped four times from prisoner-of-war camps and was finally held as an incorrigible escapee in in Bavaria.
Captivity in Ingolstadt Fluent in French, there he met journalist Remy Roure and shared a cell with Captain Charles de Gaulle. Tukhachevsky played his violin, assailed nihilist beliefs and spoke against Christians and Jews, whom he called dogs who "spread their fleas throughout the world". Later in various works he made Russians familiar with De Gaulle's military thinking. Roure, under the pseudonym of Pierre Fervacque, wrote about his encounter with Tukhachevsky. He reported that Tukhachevsky highly praised Napoleon, and also in a certain conversation, Tukhachevsky said he hated Jews for bringing Christianity and the "morality of capital" to Russia. Roure then asked him if he was a socialist, and he replied:
According to Roure, Tukhachevsky said that he would follow Lenin only if he "de-europeanised and threw Russia into barbarism", but feared Lenin would not do that. After ranting about how he could use Marxism as a justification to secure the territorial aims of the tsars and cement Russia's position as a world power, he laughed and said he was only joking. Roure said the laugh had an ironic and despairing tone.
On another occasion, following the February Revolution, Roure observed Tukhachevsky carving a "scary idol from colored cardboard", with "burning eyes", a "gaping mouth", and a "bizarre and terrible nose". He inquired about its purpose, to which Tukhachevsky responded:
Tukhachevsky's apparent neopaganism was also corroborated by another prisoner at Ingolstadt, , who recalled that he once saw a "scarecrow" in the corner of Tukhachevsky's cell, and upon asking him as to what it was, Tukhachevsky responded (to what Tsurikov interpreted as heavy sarcasm), that it was an effigy of Yarilo (the Slavic god of vegetation, fertility and springtime), which he had created during Shrovetide..
Tukhachevsky never denied and later even confirmed those stories about his imprisonment in Germany, but always said that he was politically immature in 1917 and greatly regretted his early views. In France 1936, when confronted with what Roure wrote about him, he said that he had read his book and stated the following:I was still very young... a novice at politics, and all I knew about revolutions was the last phase of the citizens' revolution in France: the Bonapartism whose military triumphs filled me with boundless admiration. (...) I never think of my views at Ingolstadt without regretting them, since they could cause doubts about my devotion to the Soviet motherland. I'm taking advantage of our reunion to tell you my true feelings.Whether or not Tukhachevsky really gave up on his old views, the assertion that he was a fully-fledged Bolshevik by the time he joined them is considered to be most likely not true.
Tukhachevsky's fifth escape met with success, and after crossing the Swiss-German border and carrying with him some small pagan idols, he returned to Russia in September 1917. After the October Revolution in 1917, Tukhachevsky joined the Bolsheviks and went on to play a key role in the Red Army despite his noble ancestry.
Russian Civil War
Tukhachevsky became an officer in the newly-established Red Army and rapidly advanced in rank because of his great ability. During the Russian Civil War, he was given responsibility for defending Moscow. The Bolshevik Defence Commissar, Leon Trotsky, gave Tukhachevsky command of the 5th Army in 1919, and he led the campaign to capture Siberia from the anticommunist White forces of Aleksandr Kolchak. Tukhachevsky used concentrated attacks to exploit the enemy's open flanks and threaten them with envelopment.
According to Tukhachevsky's close confidant Leonid Sabaneyev, when Tukhachevsky was in the service of the Military Department of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee in 1918, in his last overt display of neopaganism, Tukhachevsky drew up a project for destruction of Christianity and restoration of Slavic paganism. To that end, Tukhachevsky submitted a memo on declaring paganism as the state religion of Soviet Russia, which although mocked, also received some serious discussion in the Small Council of People's Commissars, which commended Tukhachevsky for his "joke" and his commitment to atheism. Sabaneyev observed that Tukhachevsky seemed "as happy as a schoolboy who had just succeeded in a prank."Minakov, p. 184.
Tukhachevsky also helped defeat General Anton Denikin in the Crimea in 1920, conducting the final operations. In February 1920, he launched an offensive into the Kuban and used cavalry to disrupt the enemy's rear. In the retreat that followed, Denikin's force disintegrated, and Novorossiysk was evacuated hastily.
In the final stage of the Civil War, Tukhachevsky commanded the 7th Army during the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion in March 1921. He also commanded the assault against the Tambov Republic between 1921 and 1922.
Polish–Soviet War
Tukhachevsky commanded the Soviet invasion of Poland during the Polish–Soviet War in 1920. In the lead-up to hostilities, he concentrated his troops near Vitebsk, which he theatrically dubbed, "The Gates of Smolensk". When he issued his troops orders to cross the border, Tukhachevsky said, "The fate of world revolution is being decided in the west: the way leads over the corpse of Poland to a universal conflagration.... On to Wilno, Minsk, and Warsaw – forward!"
According to Richard M. Watt, "The boldness of Tukhachevsky's drive westward was the key to his success. The Soviet High Command dispatched 60,000 men as reinforcements, but Tukhachevsky never stopped to let them catch up. His onrushing armies were leaving behind greater numbers of stragglers every day, but Tukhachevsky ignored these losses. His supply services were in chaos and his rear scarcely existed as an organized entity, but Tukhachevsky was unconcerned; his men would live off the land. On the day his troops captured Minsk, a new cry arose – 'Give us Warsaw!' Tukhachevsky was determined to give them what they wanted. All things considered, Tukhachevsky's performance was a virtuoso display of energy, determination, and, indeed, rashness.".
In the summer of 1920, Tukhachevsky successfully pushed back the joint Polish-Ukrainian army of Piłsudski and Petliura that had conquered Kiev in May. However, his armies were defeated by Piłsudski in the Battle of Warsaw shortly after. It was during the Polish war that Tukhachevsky first came into conflict with Joseph Stalin. Both blamed each other for the Soviet failure to capture Warsaw. Tukhachevsky later lamented:
His book about the war was translated into Polish and published, together with a book by Piłsudski.
Reform of the Red Army
Tukhachevsky fervently criticised the Red Army's performance during the 1926 Summer manoeuvres. He criticised the officers' inability to determine what course of action to take and communicate that with their troops especially harshly. Tukhachevsky noted that initiative among officers was lacking, that they responded slowly to changes in the situation and that communication was poor. That was not purely the officers' fault, as the only way of communication from local unit headquarters to the field positions was a single telephone line. In contrast, German divisions that mobilised shortly after during the interwar period had telephones, radio, horse, cycle and motorcycle messengers, signal lights and flags and pieces of cloth, and messages were conveyed mostly to aircraft.
Tukhachevsky reached the position of First Deputy Commissar for defence to Defence Commisar Kliment Voroshilov. Voroshilov disliked Tukhachevsky and would later be one of the initiators of the Great Purge in which Tukhachevsky was executed. According to Georgy Zhukov, it was Tukhachevsky, not Voroshilov, who ran the ministry in practice. Voroshilov disliked Tukhachevsky, but his perception of military doctrine was impacted significantly by Tukhachevsky's ideas.
According to Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin regarded Tukhachevsky as his most bitter rival and dubbed him Napoleonchik (little Napoleon).Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, pp. 221–222. Upon Stalin's ascension to the party leadership in 1929, he began receiving denunciations from senior officers who disapproved of Tukhachevsky's tactical theories. In 1930, the Joint State Political Directorate forced two officers to testify that Tukhachevsky was plotting to overthrow the Politburo via a coup d'état.Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, pp. 58–59.
According to Montefiore:
Tukhachevsky later wrote several books on modern warfare, In 1931, after Stalin had accepted the need for an industrialized military, Tukhachevsky was given a leading role in reforming the army. Tukhachevsky held advanced ideas on military strategy, particularly on the use of tanks and aircraft in combined operations.