General Mikhail Tukhachevsky was arrested on and charged, along with seven other Red Army commanders, with the creation of a "right-wing- Trotskyist" military conspiracy and espionage for Nazi Germany, based on confessions obtained from other arrested officers.īefore 1990, it was frequently argued that the case against the eight generals was based on forged documents created by the Abwehr, documents that deluded Stalin into believing that a plot was being fomented by Tukhachevsky and other Red Army commanders to depose him. The next wave of arrests of military commanders started in the second half of 1936 and increased in scope after the February–March 1937 Plenary Meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), where Vyacheslav Molotov called for more thorough exposure of " wreckers" within the Red Army since they "had already been found in all segments of the Soviet economy".Įvidence, arrest and secret trial The latter purge was accompanied by the "exposure" of the "Former Officers Plot". Former tsarist officers had been purged in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In the mid-1920s, Leon Trotsky was removed as Commissar of War, and his known supporters were expunged from the military. The trial was preceded by several purges of the Red Army.
In September 1938, the People's Commissar for Defense, Kliment Voroshilov, reported that a total of 37,761 officers and commissars were dismissed from the army, 10,868 were arrested and 7,211 were condemned for anti-Soviet crimes.
The trial triggered a massive subsequent purge of the Red Army. Only Ulrikh, Budyonny and Shaposhnikov would survive the purges that followed. The Tribunal was presided over by Vasili Ulrikh and included marshals Vasily Blyukher, Semyon Budyonny, Alexander Yegorov Army Commanders Yakov Alksnis, Boris Shaposhnikov, Ivan Panfilovich Belov, Pavel Dybenko, and Nikolai Kashirin and Corps Commander Yelisey Goryachev. Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and the senior military officers Iona Yakir, Ieronim Uborevich, Robert Eideman, August Kork, Vitovt Putna, Boris Feldman, and Vitaly Primakov (as well as Yakov Gamarnik, who committed suicide before the investigations began) were accused of anti-Soviet conspiracy and sentenced to death they were executed on the night of June 11 to 12, 1937, immediately after the verdict delivered by a Special Session (специальное судебное присутствие) of the Supreme Court of the USSR. It is traditionally considered one of the key trials of the Great Purge. The Case was a secret trial, unlike the Moscow Show Trials.
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