The Tukhachevsky Affair

T HE Tukhachevsky Affair, which precipitated the purge of the Red Army in June 1937, was far more than a minor intelligence or disinformation operation. The credibility of the conspiracy story (that Tukhachevsky and his colleagues were plotting the overthrow of Stalin in collaboration with German generals) derived from the tangled and often contradictory course of Soviet foreign policy over the preceding two decades. It began with the story of secret German-Soviet military collaboration up to the advent of Hitler, since falsified documents of this period (1920-1933) provided evidence on which the case against the Soviet generals was based.' Having at last decided that National Socialist Germany was a threat to the peace mn the spring of 1935, Stalin closed the German military training installations in the U.S.S.R. and sought the open support of France and England in an alliance system which, if given military teeth, might conceivably have frustrated Hitler's expansionist aims. Interlocking Franco-Soviet and Soviet-Czech military assistance pacts were signed in May 1935. However, there was no joint French-Soviet military planning to meet a possible German attack to the East against the Czechs or to the West against France, so that in fact the Mutual Assistance treaties were a dead letter from the outset. These military facts of life

Political science · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · German History and Society

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