Stalin

Control over the military is always an issue in a dictatorship. OGPU special departments continued to maintain watch lists for officers with tsarist pasts. Anti-Soviet émigré organizations, in parallel, strained to perceive tensions within the Red Army and infused their correspondence with fantasies about an officers’ anti-Communist putsch. But the OGPU had infiltrated émigré groups and created front organizations to intercept their correspondence, track agents infiltrating from abroad, and entrap disaffected military men at home.⁵⁸ Many former tsarist General Staff Academy graduates would have been glad to see the Communist regime evolve into something else, but, having been relegated to administrative or teaching posts, they were in no position to work for an overthrow.⁵⁹ The smarter ones feared a foreign military intervention, precisely because the regime would round them up as presumed traitors (or, conversely, the occupiers would not forgive them for serving the Reds).

⁶⁰ Voroshilov, the only quasimilitary figure in Stalin’s politburo, beat back the OGPU provocations to dredge up “enemies,” including against his own aide-de-camp.⁶¹ Still, dossiers accumulated.⁶²

The central special department, in a kind of military equivalent to the Industrial Party trial, brought together initially disparate arrests, alleging a plot for a putsch in coordination with a military attack by the old Entente powers in spring 1931. Hence, the counterintelligence operation was code-named Springtime.

Mężyński certainly knew how to please Stalin, but he might have received direct instructions.⁶³ Stalin suspected Red Army commanders, few of whom were proletarians, to be “rightist” sympathizers secretly opposed to collectivization who would prove “opportunistic” in the event of an aggression from without. The roots of the “plot” were placed in Ukraine, even though the head of the Ukraine OGPU, Balytsky, had initially not taken to the task—until Mężyński reminded him that Ukraine’s Chekists had missed the Shakhty Affair (a “discovery” of the North Caucasus OGPU).⁶⁴ Balytsky telegrammed Moscow (February 15, 1931) about a “counterrevolutionary military organization” in Kharkov. “Ivanovsky talked about the existence of a general operational plan for an uprising in Ukraine,” he wrote of extracted testimony. “The plan was sketched on a map, which Ivanovsky destroyed during the Industrial Party Trial.” Ivanovsky was also said to have corresponded with a parallel Moscow organization; that correspondence, too, had been burned.

⁶⁵

More than 3,000 former tsarist officers in Kharkov, Kiev, Moscow, and Leningrad were charged with conspiracy and espionage.⁶⁶ Shaposhnikov, the chief of staff of the army, whom Stalin had recently allowed to enter the party without the mandatory period of candidate status, was made to confront an arrested staff officer who accused him of belonging to the clandestine “organization.” Shaposhnikov exposed his accuser as a slanderer, avoiding arrest but suffering demotion, in April 1931, to commander of the Volga military district.⁶⁷

Several score officers were not merely intimidated but executed. The sixty-six-year-old tsarist major general Andrei Snesarev—who, despite having joined the Reds, was Stalin’s old nemesis during the Tsaritsyn days of 1918—was already in a labor camp on a death sentence commuted to ten years. Now he became one of the alleged plot’s “leaders” and was resentenced to death in summer 1931, although, once again, the dictator commuted his sentence (“Klim! I think, for Snesarev, we could substitute ten years instead of the highest measure”).⁶⁸

Tukhachevsky’s name, yet again, had surfaced in the “testimony” of those arrested. But Soviet intelligence had intercepted and decoded a telegram sent March 4, 1931, by the Japanese military attaché in Moscow, Lieutenant Colonel Yukio Kasahara, to the general staff in Tokyo, belittling the Red Army’s capabilities, and urging “a speedy war” before the propitious moment passed.⁶⁹ After four discussions of Japan at the politburo, on June 10, in a surprise for the brass, Stalin returned Tukhachevsky from the Leningrad military district and promoted him to replace the head of armaments, Uborevičius (who went to the Belorussian military district).⁷⁰ As a deputy defense commissar to Voroshilov once more, Tukhachevsky made a summer inspection tour of strategic regions. Thus was the sweeping Springtime operation wound down, for now; the collection of compromising materials on Tukhachevsky and others did not cease.⁷¹