had on the Red Army in WW2, very good video, much shorter than this one, highly recommend

it as an introduction to this topic.

Today, we’re going to go more in-depth and take it to the next step.

It’s time to talk about the historiography - what different historians think about the

Purge.

Because, since the opening of the Soviet archives in the early 1990’s, historians have been

able to get a hold of new primary sources that challenge the old views of the impact

of the Purges.

The question we need to ask is this - did the Purge have a massive impact on the Red

Army’s ability to fight World War 2? Or not? And why?

In this video, we’re going to look at the Purge itself, see what the traditional view

of the Purge was, see what the post-opening of the Soviet archive view of the Purge is,

and then take a look at another factor you may not have considered.

Yes, the Red Army during Stalin’s Purge.

This is their story.

The Soviet Union had fought and won the Russian Civil War.

This impacted their policies going forwards, as their army at the time had been a peasant

and cavalry force, with commissars ensuring everyone remained loyal to the revolution.

The Civil War ends in 1922, with victory for the Soviets.

In the 1920’s and early 1930’s though, there were ‘Scares’ about a possible breakout

of war with the capitalist powers.

“We have fallen behind the advanced countries by fifty to a hundred years. We must close

that gap in ten years. Either we do this or we’ll be crushed.” Stalin 1931.

Stalin and the Bolshevik party were dragging the Soviet Union into the modern age.

The Five Year Plans see a rapid expansion of Soviet industry and agriculture, at the

expense of millions of lives.

It was during this time that Tukhachevsky takes command of the Red Army.

Tukhachevsky creates a modern warfare doctrine, a concept called “Deep Battle”, which

was quite similar to the German “Blitzkrieg” (and I use that term reluctantly because it

wasn’t called that).

As a result, Tukhachevsky envisions mass numbers of tanks and aircraft that would maneuver

around the battlefield, and therefore starts building up the army’s numbers of tanks

and aircraft.

He’s trying to turn the Red Army from the peasant and cavalry force it was during the

Civil War into a modern military machine.

In this process, Red Army’s commissars are removed, and in a lot of ways Tukhachevsky

succeeds in his reforms - building the largest tank force, and air force, in the world.

In 1941, the Soviets actually have more tanks than the rest of the world combined, and the

same could be said about the number of aircraft.

It’s worth noting though that the Red Army was still mainly a peasant-army even

in the 1930’s, and the other equipment besides tanks and aircraft, were seriously lacking.

For example, in 1941 at the Battle of Dubno, Soviet motorized infantry marched into battle

on foot, because they had no trucks.

In fact, the regular Rifle Divisions had more mobility because they were at least supplied

with horses and wagons to move their artillery and equipment.

But still, with the amount of tanks and aircraft, the Red Army wasn’t quite the same it had

been during the Civil War.

And the Red Army wasn’t just gathering equipment, it was also growing in riflemen - it was mobilizing

for war.

In fact, it was the speed of German rearmament, the creation of the Luftwaffe, Italian aggression

in Abyssinia, inaction by the League of Nations, the Spanish Civil War, and Hitler’s known

desire to expand eastward, that gave the Soviet Union reason to worry about the pace of German

rearmament and the unwillingness of the Western powers to react to that.

With the threat of attack, and in the midst of rearmament and a rapid expansion of the

size of the Red Army - that is when the Purges struck.

“What made Stalin’s terror different was not merely the scale of arrests and executions

- by 1939 there were, in recent estimates, approximately 3.5 million prisoners in the

various categories of camps - but the fact that this fearful and vindictive man turned

the terror on the very heart of the Soviet system, the Party and the armed forces, even

on the NKVD, itself the apparatus of terror.” Overy, Russia’s War P24

According to Robert Service, Stalin was definitely the man responsible for the Purge of the Red

Army.

He was concerned about a ‘fifth column’ emerging in the Soviet Union to support a

foreign power in the event of war.

This had happened in the Spanish Civil War when Franco gained followers in July of 1936,

and Stalin wanted to prevent this from happening in the USSR.

And he might have been concerned about the view that the rest of the world had on the

Red Army.

“Stalin’s suspicious mind may have been sufficiently aroused by the flimsy rumours

of army unreliability currently circulating abroad to take the story of the conspiracy

seriously.” Overy. Russia’s War. P26

Rumours of the army being unreliable may have been one of the reasons for the Purge, although

Tukhachevsky had clashed with Voroshilov, and had crossed Stalin over the issue of political

propaganda in the armed forces, which Tukhachevsky wanted to reduce.

Kliment Voroshilov the current People’s Commissar for Defence and the guy the KV tanks

were named after, played an active role in the Purges.

He had a personal grudge against Tukhachevsky, who favoured tanks over Voroshilov’s cavalry.

Voroshilov had been in 1st Cavalry Army in the Civil War, and in Poland in 1920.

Tukhachevsky’s days were numbered.

“The Soviet armed forces appeared to be the only major area of state to avoid the

terror, until on the morning of 11 June 1937 Voroshilov announced the sudden arrest of

the country’s top generals and the unearthing of a treacherous plot whose tentacles reached

out to Germany.” Overy. Russia’s War. P25-26

Tukhachevsky was accused of leading a plot to overthrow the state at the head of a German

invasion - which was completely false.

He was arrested, tortured until he revealed the names of other conspirators, his family

sent to the Gulags or died in captivity, and he was subsequently shot.

And once Tukhachevsky was Purged, the dominoes started falling.

Each victim dragged in friends and colleagues to try to end their own maltreatment, and

the list of names grew with every beating. (Overy. Russia’s War. P28)

Two Marshals are shot, and one died in captivity, out of a grand total of five Marshals in 1936.

The other two Marshals were Voroshilov himself and Budennii, which is no surprise as to why

they survived, after all, both were cavalrymen from the civil war days, and friends with

Stalin at this time.

But it only got worse the further down the ranks the purge went.

“A week later, on June 1 [1937], Stalin staged a remarkable two-week long conference

in which he sat with Voroshilov and Yezhov listening to soldiers who had been invited

to the Kremlin profess loyalty to Stalin and a forceful rejection of the conspirators.

Each of them was searched at the door for arms and then given a blue folder containing

details of the charges, drawn up by Vyshinsky as news of each fresh crime was rushed hot

from the interrogation room. As they read, some of them found their own names on the

list of accomplices. At intervals NKVD men would make their way through the crowd, taking

officers away with them. The following day another group of conspirators was detailed

on the testimony of the hapless victims of the day before.” Overy. Russia’s War.

P28

Of 474 brigade-level command positions in 1936 there had been 201 executions, fifteen

deaths in captivity and a single suicide.

Overall, 45 per cent of the senior officers and political officials of the army and navy

were executed or sacked

This included 720 out of the 837 commanders, from colonel to marshal, appointed under the

new table of ranks established in 1935.

Of eighty-five senior officers on the Military Council, seventy-one were dead by 1941 - and

seven of the nine that avoided the purges had served in the 1st Cavalry Army - coincidence?

Many were killed, imprisoned or forced to flee the country.

But not all.

Some would survive and be reinstated later.

And, in addition to the executions and sackings, the Purges also gave the politicians the chance

to send their cronies into the ranks of the army.

Political Commissars were reintroduced, and a dual-command was established, which meant,

in a climate of suspicion of the Great Purges, the commander of each unit now had to get

permission to issue orders.

Dual command would once more be introduced at regimental level and above on the 10th

of May 1937.

“As supporting materials noted, the military commissar, as equal to the commander, now

shared responsibility for not only ‘the political-moral state of a unit’, but also

for ensuring military discipline and for ‘combat, operational and mobilisational preparedness’,

‘the condition of weapons’ and day-[to-]day management of units.” Hill. The Red Army

and the Second World War.

“...[every] order [had] to be signed by the military commander, head of the headquarters

and one of the members of the military Soviet, even if orders were still given in the name

of the military commander.” Hill. The Red Army and the Second World War.

And this, amongst other things, has caused a historical debate.

The debate revolves around the impact that the Purges had on the Officer Corps’s experience

and talent, and it’s overall ability to fight when war broke out with Germany in 1941.

So let’s take a look at the historical debate and the impact that the Purges had, first

from the traditional point of view.

“There is certainly widespread acknowledgement in both memoirs and the secondary literature

that the Great Purges had a negative impact on Red Army capabilities and performance.”

Hill. The Red Army and the Second World War.

Historians, especially those before the opening of the Soviet archives in the early 1990’s,

believed that the Purges had a detrimental impact on the Red Army’s Officer Corps,

which was one of the reasons the Red Army performed so poorly in the first years of

the Second World War.

There were two main aspects to this -

The first being the loss of experience of the Officer Corps, and the second being the

loss of morale that accompanied it.

Both meant that the Red Army entered the Great Patriotic War with an officer corps that was

incapable of dealing with a modern war.

Let’s look at both of these aspects in detail. First, the loss of experience.

“Perhaps the most obvious impact to start with is the significance of the loss of those

killed from the point of view of losing their skills and knowledge, and particularly where

replacements were often not as capable or experienced.” Hill. The Red Army and the

Second World War.

It stands to reason that with so many experienced officers killed or imprisoned, that this was

the most significant impact of the purges on the Red Army.

Worse, Red Army educational institutions struggled to keep pace with the educational requirements

of a growing army, even before the purges.

In March 1938 the Frunze Military Academy had only 106 teaching staff out 167 positions.

15 of these had already been stated for removal.

61 were under investigation.

And 18 more were being considered for removal.

By May 1939, there were only 358 teaching staff out of 544 positions at the Frunze Military

Academy.

And there was only 2 professors out of 40 potential positions.

There were 19 associate professors out of 105 positions.

And 9 assistant staff out of 75 positions.

This dire lack of teaching staff, notably affected the new officers coming in to replace

the old, with many only getting 2 years of education where the older generations had

previously got 3 to 4 years worth of education.

In addition to experience and skill loss, the Red Army ‘officer corps’ during the

purges had suffered a major blow to its collective prestige and authority, as well as its morale.

“It perhaps also seems intuitive that fear amongst command cadres looking not to draw

negative attention on themselves in a climate where many failures would be interpreted as

‘wrecking’ would limit the extent to which they would have been willing to show initiative.”

Hill. The Red Army and the Second World War.

And, not only were the officers reluctant to show initiative, they were also hamstrung

by commissars, who would question their motives, their orders, and limit their actions.

Obviously it’s hard to measure the morale impact of the Purges had on the Red Army,

but the traditional narrative makes it clear that it was severe.

So from the traditional narrative then, it does seem like there’s a good case that

says the Purges had a massive detrimental impact on the effectiveness of the Officer

Corps, in terms of Morale, Skill and Experience.

However, with the opening of the Soviet archives in the early 1990’s, a different story soon

emerged - quite literally the same year or the year after, once historians got their

hands on the actual numbers and statistics.

This new narrative calls into doubt the impact the Purges had on the Red Army officer corps.

Before the publication of the new figures, historians guessed that between 25% and 50%

of the Red Army officer corps was purged. Reese. P199

But as this table shows, that was not the case.

From 1936 to 1938 a total of 41,218 were purged.

Of the 34,301 officers sacked, 11,596 were reinstated by May of 1940.

And we know that those discharged were not all killed because officers continued to be

reinstated after May of 1940.

In reality, 30% of army officers arrested or discharged between 1937 and 1939 were reinstated.

(Reese. P210)