The Great Terror

Under this Tsaritsyn group had come a cavalry unit headed by Budenny, initially little better than bandits. He himself relates that Trotsky at the time spoke of them as “a horde,” under “an Ataman ringleader…. Where he leads his gang, there they will go; for the Reds today, tomorrow for the Whites.”⁵ One of Budenny’s commanders actually shot a commissar for protesting against the sack of Rostov. As recruits came in, the “horde” was later expanded, with Stalin’s help, to be the First Cavalry Army. It had attracted efficient as well as erratic elements, and improved with organization. Its Military Council had consisted of Voroshilov, Shchadenko, and Budenny.

The First Cavalry Army was involved in the fiercest controversy of all—the argument about responsibility for the Soviet defeat in the Battle of Warsaw in 1920. As Tukhachevsky had struck north of the Polish capital with the main bulk of the Soviet forces, Yegorov and Stalin with the Southern Front, including Budenny’s men, had been attacking toward Lwów. Orders to divert Budenny northward had been disregarded until too late, at best on technical excuses, at worst in a short-sighted attempt to secure local glory at the expense of the main effort. It is arguable that the Soviet forces were anyhow overextended, but the bulk of Soviet military opinion followed Tukhachevsky in feeling that Stalin, Yegorov, and Budenny had wantonly robbed the offensive of whatever chance it had. Lenin seems to have agreed, remarking, “Who on earth would want to get to Warsaw by going through Lwów?”⁶ The whole matter was thrashed out in public in military lectures. There can be no doubt that it rankled bitterly with Stalin, and when he gained full control of the history books the whole episode was represented as a strategically sound drive on Lwów, sabotaged for motives of treason by Tukhachevsky and Trotsky.fn3

But at the time, the controversy soon began to seem minor and academic. Compared with the true political virulences then prevailing, the Army gradually became a quiet area amid the storms of Soviet political life.

In the 1920s, Communists in the armed forces were at first strongly and openly involved in the political arguments of the time. Antonov-Ovseenko, Head of the Army Political Administration, had been forthrightly Trotskyite. Lashevich, the Zinovievite Deputy Commissar for War, had actually held a more or less secret oppositionist meeting in a wood while still at his post.

But later, this sort of overt action ceased. For a time, Army Communists still entered, though more discreetly than the civilians, into the controversies of the time. Putna was among the officers signing some sort of confidential defense of the opposition in 1927.⁷ Tukhachevsky had not been involved in this, or any similar move. We may make a certain distinction between the professional soldiers who became Communists, like Tukhachevsky, Kork, and Yegorov, and the Communists who became professional soldiers, like Yakir, Blyukher, and Alksnis. Even at this time, the former played little part in politics—except when military matters were directly affected, as when Tukhachevsky and Uborevich opposed Trotsky’s ideas of Army organization.

But in any case, from the establishment of Stalin’s primacy at the end of the 1920s, the Army Command had wholly withdrawn from the political struggle. In part, this was evidently due to the same ideas that decided Pyatakov: the leadership question was settled. What remained was the professional problem of creating a sound military force. And, conversely, Stalin had been careful not to stir up trouble among the soldiery. Just as he had “neutralized” the Ukraine by withdrawing Kaganovich in 1928, so he now left Tukhachevsky and his fellows a comparatively free hand. The Army’s Communists had a high reputation in the Party. In the comparatively mild Party purge of 1929, some 5 percent of military Communists were purged, compared with 11.7 percent in the Party as a whole; in the 1933 purge, the figures were 4.3 percent and 17 percent, respectively.

It is true that an occasional officer suffered. But this was usually a special case, like that of the military academic Snesarev, formerly a Tsarist general, since rehabilitated. “In January 1930, on a charge of having participated in a counter-revolutionary monarchist officers’ organization, he was arrested along with other military specialists,” and at the age of sixty-five was deported to hard labor in the far north, where he died in 1937.⁸