e Great Purges Decapitate USSR
Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a prominent victim of the Great Purges.
Josef Stalin was paranoid of everyone. As dictator of the Soviet Union, he saw enemies wherever he looked for them: among his friends, family, the army, the intelligentsia, fellow party members, and acquaintances. Stalin began his purges in 1936, seeking to eliminate the Old Bolsheviks who fought in the Russian Civil War as well as any political rivals, but as the purges progressed, individuals from all facets of society became targets. Nobody was safe. Ninety percent of Red Army officers were purged, including three out of five Marshals, thirteen out of fifteen army commanders, and all sixteen army commissars.[18] Many talented commanders like Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Alexander Yegrov, Iona Yakir, and Vitaly Primakov were all put to death. Prominent journalists, writers, politicians, engineers, and architects were also killed or imprisoned. All in all, declassified Soviet documents reveal that 681, 692 people were killed from 1937-1938—an average of one thousand executions a day.[19] Many more were arrested and died later in the gulags.
The needless loss of so many Russian intellectuals and leaders meant that the Soviet Union was wholly unprepared to deal with the German invasion of 1941. Stalin’s purges had effectively decapitated the Red Army of all its best officers. Even the Soviet military doctrine which was written by Tukhachevsky, was replaced by a crude, and wholly ineffective one written by Kliment Voroshilov, a diehard Stalinist. Many of the tragic disasters on the eastern front during the early years of the war such as Smolensk (1941) and Kerch (1942) occurred as a direct result of the lack of well-trained, experienced Soviet officers.
Those who are sympathetic to Soviet Russia laud the will of the communists to resist and ultimately beat back the Nazi invasion. However, the reason why the Germans had such success against the Russians in the early stages of Operation Barbarossa was due to the unfit state of the Red Army to repel such an invasion. Stalin’s purges had consolidated his hold over the country and eliminated any opposition, but they were ultimately wasteful and unproductive. The Purges also indirectly led to millions of Russians being needlessly slaughtered during World War Two.
