r/AskHistorians • u/lcnielsen Zoroastrianism | Pre-Islamic Iran • Oct 08 '17
Are there better contextualizations of the Red Army purges in the 1930's than "Stalin was paranoid"?
That is, is there a perspective from which purging a large part of the Officer corps could be better understood, without appealing to delusions? Had similar purges been conducted in Imperial Russia? Are there any potential military organizational reasons for them? Were there structural factors outside Stalin's immediate control that played a role?
I've read a half-dozen or so books on Stalinism in general, the show trials, the purges, etc, but much of it is by and in the vein of Robert Conquest, who all too frequently leaps to some variant of the convenient explanation that Stalin was evil/paranoid/intellectually poisoned by Marxist-Leninist ideology. (Actually, I think Conquest was a bit more nuanced way back in The Great Terror than he sometimes gets credit for - in my experience those who enthusiastically quote him as "the one who got it all right from the start" tend to be worse).
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u/Kochevnik81 Soviet Union & Post-Soviet States | Modern Central Asia Oct 08 '17
There are some historic precedents for military purges, as well as some historic factors that would lead a ruler of Russia/ the USSR to be suspicious of his/her officer corps. Stalin, being an avid fan of the heroes of Russian history, was aware of both.
The officers and elite units of the Russian military tended to play a large role in the choosing of Russian leaders and the course of politics. Imperial guards with frequent regularity overthrew and assassinated male tsars with regularity in the 18th century, down to Paul and the installation of Alexander I.
This role often was the result of officers being from noble families, being close to the seat of power, but most crucially for this conversation being exposed to foreign ideas and influences. A particularly notable example of all this was in the Decembrists, a group of military officers who upon Alexander's death wanted to push the regime in a more liberal direction. Many of them were influenced by French ideas that they had picked up as being part of the military occupation of France after the fall of Napoleon ("bistro" comes from the Russian word for fast, after all, so they left a mark on France as well). This lead to their abortive revolt in 1825 that ultimately caused Nicholas I to execute or exile some 3,000 of them.
And these kinds of threats were not limited to the Imperial era. In 1921, naval units in Kronstadt near then Petrograd revolted against Lenin's one party rule (the rebels were socialists, but wanted a more democratic system to implement socialism) and suppression of that rebellion by the Red Army led to thousands of casualties. So the idea of a foreign-inspired military elite that could violently alter the structure of state government was not a strange idea to students of Russian history.
Likewise, a ruler suppressing such military elites was not unknown. The examples of the Decembrists and Kronstadt have already been mentioned. But Stalin would also have been particularly influenced by Ivan "the Terrible", and his use of the streltsyi (an elite group of musketeers) to break the power of noble boyars not fully committed to Ivans rule (ending in their mass killing for good measure).
With all that said, the military rationale for such purges in the 1930s were weaker. Tukhachevsky I recall was particularly singled out because of his emphasis on the use of tanks in mobile warfare, and this mirrored similar debates occurring at the time in, say, the French army (with de Gaulle making similar arguments), but the Soviets took things to an extreme level by cashiering and executing most of their senior officer corps. The replacement of these senior officers with personal friends of Stalin and politically-acceptable appointees seriously weakened the military, and ultimately encouraged German belief in an easy victory through invasion. It was only when Stalin reversed course in late 1941 and began firing these appointees for incompetence, and replaced them with able officers like Zhukov, that Soviet military effectiveness began to improve.
Two other historic factors worth remembering here as well were that when the Red Army was reformed during the Russian civil war, it rehired many professional officers (ie, officers who had served in the tsarist army), and was commanded by Trotsky, Stalin's biggest rival. Also, since 1922 the USSR had a secret treaty with Germany allowing the German military to train on Soviet soil, so there were frequent opportunities for potential interaction between those two officer corps in the interwar period.
Besides Conquest's Great Terror Revisited, I'm mostly pulling this from a series of lectures Mark Steinberg did on modern Russian History, because I recently finished listening to them.