Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevsky

Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevsky (1893-1937), Soviet military leader, who helped modernize the Red Army during its rearmament program in the 1930s. Born into a noble family in Russia’s Smolensk province, he attended the Aleksandrovsk Military School from 1912 to 1913. Tukhachevsky served as an officer in the Russian Imperial Army during World War I (1914-1918). After the Bolsheviks seized power in the Russian Revolution of 1917, he joined the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) in 1918 and subsequently became a military commander in the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army. He held important command positions during the Russian Civil War (1918-1921)—fighting the counterrevolutionary White armies on the eastern and southern fronts—and during the concurrent war between Russia and Poland in 1920. A talented military operations commander, Tukhachevsky enjoyed such success against the White armies that Joseph Stalin called him “the demon of the civil war.” Tukhachevsky was also instrumental in suppressing the Kronshtadt Rebellion against the Bolshevik regime in 1921.

After serving as commander of the Western Military District, Tukhachevsky was appointed chief of staff of the Red Army in 1925 and set about reorganizing the army’s technical rearmament. With this goal, he urged Stalin—who was then the leader of the Soviet Union—to create a special defense industry as part of the industrialization program. Stalin refused and Tukhachevsky resigned from his post, moving to the lesser position of chief of the Leningrad Military District in 1928. Stalin later agreed on the rearmament program and in 1931 appointed Tukhachevsky a deputy people’s commissar of defense, chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council, and chief of armaments for the Red Army. Directing the scientific and technical rearming of the Red Army, Tukhachevsky successfully developed and introduced new military technology. From 1936 to 1937 he was first deputy people’s commissar of defense and chief of the Red Army’s Department for Combat Preparedness. In 1937, as part of his massive purges, Stalin decided to move against the Red Army command, whose loyalty he had never trusted. Tukhachevsky was arrested in May and accused of conspiring with the Germans against the Soviet Union. He was tried along with several other commanders at a closed military tribunal and executed in June 1937. In 1958 Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev rehabilitated Tukhachevsky’s name.