The Great Terror

7 Assault on the Army

fn1

The other “military” full members were Voroshilov and Gamamik.

fn2

Blyukher, Budenny, Tukhachevsky, and Yegorov.

fn3

Stalin also put some of the blame for the Polish debacle on Smilga (John Erickson, The Soviet High Command [London, 1962], p. 99).

fn4

The same is true of vague reports that the idea of a coup occurred to some officers, in particular Feldman, but that none of the senior generals were involved. The other “military conspiracy” mentioned at the Bukharin Trial—that of Peterson, Commander of the Kremlin Guard, who intended a palace coup—is only perfunctorily linked with Tulchachevsky (

Bukharin Trial

, pp. 570, 177); but again, though not implausible, there is no evidence for it.

fn5

Shmidt was being interrogated “nine months before” the June Trial with a view to incriminating Yakir (I. V. Dubinskiy,

Naperekor vetram

[Moscow, 1964], pp. 243ff).

fn6

Who himself remarked that he could always turn a Communist into a Nazi, but could not do the same with a Social Democrat (Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks [New York, 1940], p.

fn7

Indeed, in the occupied countries during the war, too, the Gestapo was in contact with the local Communist Parties, at least in the period before the German—Soviet war. In France, negotiations with the French Communist Party had reached the stage of discussing permission to let

L’Humanite

appear. In occupied Norway, Communist periodicals were briefly allowed. The position was similar in Belgium.

fn8

A minor point is that of the military men, they implicated Tulchachevsky only, and that they are said to have included Stalin’s Ambassador first in Berlin and then in Paris, Surits, who was (by a curious quirk) one of the very few Ambassadors to survive the Purge.

fn9

Shot on 14 June 1938 (

Sovetskaya istoricheskaya entsyklopediya)

.

fn10

“At least,” because that is not to allow for replacements who must have come in: the proportion who had gone through military political schools, compared with that in 1934, had gone down by half. So of the 10,500, the assumption is that some 5,000 were fresh and raw.