Stalin vs. His Own Military

Tukhachevsky

Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin, fearing opposition to his rule from within his military, purged his senior office ranks in the 1930s.  Among those slain were officers M. N. Tukhachevsky and V. K. Triandafillov.  These two “had pioneered the … ideas of deep battle and deep operations … concepts that involved mechanized forces penetrating [to the] heart” of an opposing force’s strength.[1]  

Triandafillov

These two officers represented the core of new conceptual thinking about operational warfare in the Red Army.  They, along with many of the others who perished, had what was sorely lacking in Stalin’s forces after the purge—battlefield experience.  (Ironically, their concepts were incorporated into the U.S. Army ‘AirLand Battle’ doctrine in the 1980s, the operational doctrine employed to such great effect in the defeat of Saddam Hussein’s forces in the Persian Gulf War, and which probably had, in the late 1980s, a sobering effect on Soviet military thinking, and may have contributed to the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991). Their loss precipitated the immediate “reorganization of the Red Army and [the] breakup of armored formations.[2]  The cost of their loss to the Red Army was not fully realized until the onset of Germany’s operation BARBAROSSA in World War II.  To defend against the assault, Stalin, lacking the operation insight of comrades Tukhachevsky and Triandafillov, placed his heavy forces at the very front of his defenses, thereby blunting their effectiveness and ensuring their destruction.

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[1] Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millet, A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2000), 112.

[2] Ibid.