Stalin

Tukhachevsky had been demoted from chief of staff to commander of the Leningrad military district. He remained a polarizing figure, a former nobleman who mixed prominently with tsarist general staff types, even though he had never gone to the general staff academy. Many people deemed him, as one put it, “smart, energetic, firm, but vile to the last degree, nothing sacred besides his own direct advantage.”²⁶² At a public book discussion, he had been the target of resentful shouts in the hall (“You should be hung for 1920,” a reference to the Polish-Soviet War debacle).²⁶³ Recently, he had submitted a fourteen-page memorandum to Voroshilov calling for massive increases in military industry. Tukhachevsky argued that no modern army could prevail without tanks, aircraft, chemical weapons, and parachute infantry for greater mobility. He called for annual production of no less than 50,000 tanks and 40,000 airplanes (which would rise in the future to 197,000 tanks and 122,500 aircraft). This unsolicited program had put Voroshilov—already anxious about Stalin’s fondness for Uborevičius, another modernizer—on the spot.

Voroshilov had had the memo vivisected by the new chief of staff, Shaposhnikov. Although Tukhachevsky had not specified the size of his proposed standing army, Shaposhnikov reckoned it at a preposterous 11 million, fully 7.5 percent of the Soviet population.²⁶⁴ Then the defense commissar had sat on these materials for weeks.²⁶⁵ Immediately after “Dizzy with Success” was published castigating excesses, Voroshilov had sent the original and Shaposhnikov’s damning assessment to Stalin, noting that “Tukhachevsky wants to be original and . . . ‘radical.’”²⁶⁶ Stalin had answered, “You know that I greatly respect comrade Tukhachevsky as an especially capable comrade,” a remarkable admission. But Stalin, too, dismissed Tukhachevsky’s “‘fantastic’ plan” as out of touch with “the real possibilities of the economic, financial, and cultural order,” and concluded that “to implement such a ‘plan’ would entail ruining both the country’s economy and the army. It would be worse than any counterrevolution.”²⁶⁷

Stalin’s letter had deemed Tukhachevsky a victim of “faddish ‘leftism,’” but in Mężyński’s September 10, 1930, letter, he was accused of harboring “rightist” sentiments as the head of a military plot. Collectivization had provoked hints of wavering in the Red Army (something Voroshilov denied), and Stalin was preternaturally given to seeing an ideological affinity between the party right deviation and the tsarist-era officers. Police informants who suffused the military milieu reported gossip, on the basis of which the OGPU had arrested two military academy teachers close to Tukhachevsky.²⁶⁸ At first their “testimony” was vague, involving his Gypsy lover (who might be working for foreign intelligence), but under police direction they began to “recollect” Tukhachevsky’s possible links to “right deviationists,” until soon enough they spoke of a monarchist-military plot to seize power.²⁶⁹ “I reported this case to comrade Molotov and asked for authorization, while awaiting your directives,” Mężyński wrote in his letter to Stalin, asking whether he should immediately arrest all the top military men named or await Stalin’s return, which, given the alleged existence of a coup plot, could be risky. Stalin instructed Mężyński to “limit yourself to maximally careful surveillance.”²⁷⁰

Had Stalin believed in the existence of a genuine military plot, could he have suggested waiting to arrest the plotters and remained on holiday, far from the capital, for another month? It is impossible to establish his thinking definitively. Still, it appears that for him the “coup plot” derived not from facts per se, but from Marxist-Leninist logic: criticism of collectivization ipso facto meant support for capitalism; support for capitalism meant colluding with the imperialists; furthering the cause of imperialism meant effectively plotting to overthrow the Soviet regime; plotting an overthrow perforce entailed assassinating Stalin, since he embodied the building of socialism.

Elections in Germany on September 14, 1930, meanwhile, delivered a sensation: the National Socialists received 6.37 million votes, 18.25 percent of the total, and increased their parliamentary deputies from 12 to 107, becoming the second-largest party in the Reichstag, after the Social Democrats, at 143. Communist deputies increased from 54 to 77. Pravda (September 16) deemed the vote a “temporary success of the bourgeoisie,” even while noting that millions of those who had voted for the Nazis had rejected the existing order.