• Military Menu                       

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Industry
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• WMD
• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space

1937-1941 - Military Purges

Joseph Stalin's relationship with the Red Army differed fundamentally from Hitler's corruption of the Wehrmacht, replacing systematic bribery with systematic terror. Where Hitler purchased compliance through financial inducements while maintaining an uneasy coexistence with his generals, Stalin pursued their wholesale destruction through mass execution, creating a command structure paralyzed by fear rather than compromised by greed. The catastrophic military purges of 1937-1938 represented the most intensive peacetime destruction of a nation's officer corps in recorded history. Within two years, approximately two-thirds of the 1,863 officers holding general-grade military ranks in 1936 were arrested, and nearly half were executed. This decimation occurred not because the Red Army threatened Stalin's power, but because the Bolshevik regime had never trusted its military establishment and Stalin's paranoid worldview transformed long-standing anxiety into murderous action.¹

Unlike the Wehrmacht, which traced its lineage to the Prussian military tradition and maintained institutional continuity, the Red Army was born in revolutionary chaos. The Bolsheviks had destroyed the Tsarist officer corps and constructed a new military from revolutionary zeal, former Tsarist officers of uncertain loyalty, and Communist Party oversight. From its inception in 1918, the Red Army existed under political commissar supervision designed to ensure military commanders never accumulated independent power. The officer corps included many former Imperial Russian Army officers whose expertise was essential but whose ideological reliability remained perpetually suspect. Rumors of military conspiracy and Bonapartist ambitions had surrounded the Soviet high command continuously throughout the interwar period. Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the Red Army's most brilliant theorist and strategist, was regularly portrayed as a potential "Soviet Bonaparte" who might challenge Stalin's authority. These suspicions never dissipated. Throughout the twenty-year period before the 1937 purge, there was never a moment when the Bolsheviks believed their army was genuinely reliable or secure.²

During the 1920s and early 1930s, the Red Army underwent remarkable transformation under Tukhachevsky's intellectual leadership. The military establishment transitioned from a predominantly militia force of only 563,000 regular troops in the 1920s to a multi-million man regular army by the late 1930s, enabled by the industrial base Stalin's forced industrialization had created. This period represented the heyday of Tukhachevsky's influence on Red Army tactics and strategy. His concepts emphasized mobility enabled by aircraft, tanks, and motor vehicles, taking advantage of the new industrial capacity. Tukhachevsky pioneered the use of airborne forces, becoming the first commander to employ paratroopers in military maneuvers. His theoretical work on deep operations and combined arms warfare would influence military thinking worldwide, though ironically the Germans would implement similar concepts more effectively than the Soviets who originated them.³

However, the seeds of the military establishment's destruction were planted even during this creative period. Beginning in 1931, after a decade of relatively open military-theoretical debate, Tukhachevsky himself organized the persecution of his main rival in strategic matters. This represented a turning point where military professionalism began giving way to political considerations. Tukhachevsky thus contributed to the strangulation of honest military-theoretical discussion and the deprofessionalization and politicization of the armed forces. In a bitter irony, he would become the most prominent victim of the very culture of political persecution he had helped enable. The Spanish Civil War of 1936-1937 further complicated Soviet military thinking. Neither the German units supporting Franco's Nationalists nor the Soviet forces aiding the Republic possessed sufficient tanks to execute the large-scale independent armored operations that interwar theorists like Tukhachevsky had envisioned, casting doubt on whether these ambitious theories could work in practice.⁴

The Tukhachevsky affair and the beginning of the military purge

The purge burst into public view on June 11, 1937, when Marshal Tukhachevsky and seven other senior officers were tried in secret on charges of coordinating a German-funded military plot. All were found guilty and executed within hours. The accused included some of the Red Army's most capable commanders including Marshal Ion Yakir, Army Commander Ieronim Uborevich (commander of the Belorussian Military District), Corps Commander August Kork (head of the Frunze Military Academy), Corps Commander Vitovt Putna (former military attaché in London and Tokyo), Cavalry Corps Commander Robert Eideman, Cavalry Corps Commander Vitaly Primakov, and General Yakov Feldman (chief of the Personnel Section of the General Staff). These men represented the intellectual and operational elite of the Soviet military. Tukhachevsky in particular was recognized internationally as one of the finest military minds of his generation, a pioneer of deep operations doctrine and mechanized warfare theory that would later influence military thinking worldwide.⁵

Recent archival research reveals that the purge's origins were more complex than simple paranoia. Documents fabricated by the Nazis may have served as a pretext for the arrests, but the conspiracy appears to have been driven primarily by attempts of Tukhachevsky and other senior officers to remove People's Commissar of Defense Kliment Voroshilov from his post for gross incompetence. Voroshilov, a Stalin loyalist and Civil War veteran who lacked modern military expertise, skillfully used Stalin's trust and the services of secret intelligence and informers within the army to eliminate his critics and rivals. During the years of terror, Voroshilov systematically destroyed those who questioned his leadership. Crucially, there is no evidence that Voroshilov attempted to save anyone accused during the terror, including officers with whom he had served for years. His complicity in the purges ensured his own survival while devastating the institution he nominally led.⁶

The show trial on June 11, 1937 exemplified the regime's theatrical brutality. Trumped-up charges were presented against Tukhachevsky and his co-defendants, with former colleagues including Marshal Boris Shaposhnikov and Marshal Semyon Budyonny participating in the interrogation—a grotesque spectacle of erstwhile comrades condemning men they knew to be innocent. Immediately after the executions, Voroshilov issued a directive calling for the purge of the Red Army from all participants in the alleged "military plot." This directive transformed what might have been a targeted elimination of potential rivals into a wholesale slaughter that swept thousands of officers into oblivion, as anyone connected to the condemned men became suspect themselves.⁷

The charges were entirely fabricated. No genuine German-funded conspiracy existed within the Red Army. The confessions were extracted through torture so severe that when Tukhachevsky's interrogation records were discovered decades later, the pages were splattered with blood. One of the judges, General Ivan Belov, later described his state of mind during the trial in revealing terms indicating the proceedings were predetermined theater rather than genuine jurisprudence. Within an hour of sentencing, senior executioner Vasili Blokhin shot each defendant individually. Blokhin would later organize the infamous Katyn massacre of Polish officers, suggesting a certain institutional continuity in Soviet methods of eliminating military personnel deemed threatening.⁸ While some historians have suggested that forged German documents purporting to show collaboration between Wehrmacht and Red Army officers may have influenced Stalin, the evidence indicates Stalin had already determined his course of action and required no external prompting. The purge stemmed from his worldview and the regime's long-standing anxieties about military loyalty, not from any credible evidence of conspiracy.

The scale and mechanics of terror

Following the Tukhachevsky executions, the purge expanded rapidly. While approximately 35,000 Red Army officers were arrested over 1937-1938, this figure understates the full impact. Many of those arrested were later released, but the arrests themselves created a climate of terror that affected military operations for years. The purge struck hardest at the upper ranks but affected all levels of command. Although the senior ranks experienced the most severe losses in terms of percentages, the numerical bulk of victims came from subordinates unfortunate enough to be on the wrong staff or performing the wrong mission. Of the thirteen army commanders in 1937, eleven were shot. Of 85 corps commanders, 57 were executed. Of 195 division commanders, 110 were killed. Historians estimate that 81 of 103 Soviet generals and admirals were executed during this period. All eleven deputy commissars for defense were arrested. Three of five marshals were shot. The Navy lost all eight admirals serving on the Naval Staff.⁸ Estimates of total losses from this mass bloodletting range from 15,000 to 30,000 officers, depending upon which dates and figures are used. The uncertainty itself reflects the chaos and secrecy that surrounded the terror.

The purge created a self-perpetuating dynamic as each arrested officer's confessions—extracted under torture—implicated others, creating cascading waves of arrests that extended throughout the military hierarchy. The multiple waves of military purges, which began in 1937 and lasted into the opening months of World War II, liquidated most Red Army theoreticians and senior commanders. Inevitably, their innovative ideas fell into disuse or outright disrepute. Incredibly, the slaughter of thousands of military personnel was rooted in Stalin's paranoia rather than any genuine coup attempt. The families, friends, and colleagues of the condemned either joined them in oblivion or sat with faces frozen in mute resignation, waiting for the summons that could arrive at any moment. Even those who survived the initial waves lived in constant fear. As an additional cruelty, most of the 1.8 million Soviet prisoners of war who survived Axis captivity and were liberated at the end of World War II were sent to the Gulag as "traitors to the motherland," extending Stalin's paranoid persecution even to those who had suffered most for their country.⁹

The mechanics of the purge revealed Stalin's direct involvement. NKVD records show Stalin frequently met with secret police chief Nikolai Yezhov during the purges, especially following Tukhachevsky's arrest. Stalin personally selected many targets among high-ranking military figures, with the proportion being larger for the highest ranks. For lower-ranking victims, the NKVD operated with considerable discretion based on criteria Stalin outlined. The secret police faced few institutional constraints while selecting, arresting, interrogating, and disposing of victims. The process was streamlined and brutal, designed to extract confessions that could be used to justify further arrests. Connections to Tukhachevsky and other early victims provided momentum for the expanding purge, as interrogators forced arrested officers to name associates who were then arrested in turn.⁹

A statistical analysis of the purge patterns reveals Stalin's targeting strategy. Generals who had made visits to Germany faced significantly higher risk, with the probability of repression being approximately thirteen to fourteen percent higher than for others. However, being born outside the 1937 Soviet borders was not itself a contributing factor once ethnicity was accounted for, suggesting that foreign contacts rather than personal origins mattered most. Certain ethnic minorities faced particularly severe persecution. Critically, the evidence strongly suggests Stalin was not reacting to any genuine coup threat but rather sought to preemptively minimize the possibility of military opposition. The purge specifically targeted the most competent officers. Controlling for other characteristics including military rank and party history, the probability of repression increased with demonstrated competence and capability. Stalin was systematically destroying precisely those officers most capable of effective military leadership, whether in war or in any potential challenge to his authority.¹⁰

Additional waves of military terror

The 1937-1938 purge did not mark the end of Stalin's assault on the Red Army. Between October 1940 and February 1942, even as Nazi Germany prepared for and then launched its invasion of the Soviet Union, Stalin initiated additional purges targeting the Air Force and military-related industries. This wave began with NKVD investigations into high accident rates in the Air Force, leading to mass arrests of aviation leadership. When a German aircraft landed in Moscow undetected in May 1941, it triggered further arrests based on alleged anti-Soviet conspiracies of German spies within the military. The timing proved catastrophic. Suspects were transferred from Military Counterintelligence to NKVD custody in early June 1941, just weeks before the German invasion on June 22. Arrests continued even after the war began, creating the surreal situation of military officers being executed for alleged treachery while German forces were literally advancing toward Moscow.¹¹

The pattern repeated during the war's early months. Commanders who presided over Soviet defeats were arrested and executed as scapegoats for failures that stemmed from poor strategic preparation, inadequate equipment, and the very purges that had gutted experienced leadership. General Dmitry Pavlov, who commanded the Western Front during the initial German onslaught, was arrested after his forces were encircled and destroyed. Pavlov was shot along with his chief of staff and other officers, blamed for defeats that resulted from impossible strategic circumstances created partly by the earlier purges. In October 1941, twenty individuals including Colonel Generals Alexander Loktionov and Grigory Shtern were summarily shot near Kuybyshev on secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria's personal order. On February 23, 1942—the Day of the Red Army—Stalin approved the execution of forty-six individuals including seventeen generals sentenced to death by the NKVD's Special Council. These killings continued even as the Soviet Union fought for survival against German invasion.¹²

Stalin's motivations and the destruction of military professionalism

Stalin's fundamental objective was creating a military establishment with which he could be comfortable—a docile instrument of his will that would execute his orders without question and with which he would not need to negotiate to attain his objectives. If he lost talent in the process, it represented a small price for peace of mind. Talent was expendable; absolute control was precious. Leon Trotsky, writing from exile, offered a penetrating analysis of Stalin's methods. Trotsky argued that the purges were designed to ensure Voroshilov's loyalty by making him complicit in heinous crimes. Stalin prepared the extermination of Voroshilov's closest collaborators through the NKVD, behind Voroshilov's back and without his knowledge, then confronted him with the necessity to choose. Trapped by Stalin's machinations, Voroshilov collaborated in the extermination of the finest commanders in the Red Army and thereafter remained a sorry and impotent figure, incapable of ever opposing Stalin. As Trotsky observed, "Stalin is a past master of the art of tying a man to him not by winning his admiration but by forcing him into complicity in heinous and unforgivable crimes. Such are the bricks of the pyramid of which Stalin is the peak."¹⁰

The purge's impact extended beyond personnel to military doctrine and institutional culture. After the repression, few officers had the courage to ask questions, including about military planning. The climate of fear stifled professional military judgment and honest assessment. With senior leadership decimated, remaining officers developed super-optimistic forecasts based on alleged Red Army superiority over likely adversaries rather than realistic assessments of enemy capabilities. Soviet military plans systematically underestimated the power of enemy defenses. This threatened the advancing army with catastrophic losses in human strength already in the first days of any war, risking the extermination of the best remaining personnel. The Soviet rear was extended and distant from potential fronts, with inadequate artillery support for advancing units. These planning failures, born of fear and the destruction of experienced leadership, would manifest catastrophically when Germany invaded in June 1941.¹¹

The purge also reversed doctrinal developments that had shown promise. Despite the success of Soviet armored forces at Khalkhin-Gol against Japan in the Far East in 1939, the mixed experiences in Spain, Poland, and Finland cast doubt on large mechanized formations. In November 1939, the Soviet High Command abolished its four large tank corps and replaced them with smaller motorized divisions organized on a combined-arms basis. This represented a retreat from the ambitious concepts Tukhachevsky and others had developed. The doctrinal confusion reflected both the loss of the theorists who had created deep operations concepts and the broader uncertainty that pervaded an officer corps traumatized by the purges and afraid to advocate boldly for fear of being denounced as deviationist or defeatist.

Stalin's micromanagement and contempt for military expertise

Like Hitler, Stalin increasingly interfered with military operations, though his relationship with surviving commanders evolved differently over time. Initially, Stalin insisted on approving major operational decisions and frequently overruled military advice. His refusal to credit warnings of impending German invasion in June 1941, despite extensive intelligence indicating attack preparations, reflected both his distrust of military intelligence and his conviction that his political judgment superseded professional military assessment. The catastrophic surprise of Operation Barbarossa resulted partly from Stalin's insistence that Germany would not attack while still engaged with Britain, a political calculation that proved disastrously wrong. In the war's early months, Stalin's interference contributed to disasters including the encirclement of Soviet forces at Kiev, where his refusal to authorize timely retreat doomed hundreds of thousands of troops.¹³

However, unlike Hitler, Stalin eventually learned to grant his commanders greater operational latitude. After the near-catastrophe of 1941-1942, Stalin increasingly deferred to capable commanders like Georgy Zhukov and Konstantin Rokossovsky for operational decisions, though he retained ultimate strategic authority. This adaptation distinguished Stalin from Hitler, who became increasingly rigid and micromanagerial as Germany's situation deteriorated. Stalin's terror had cowed the Red Army into absolute obedience, but he recognized that winning the war required professionally competent military leadership. Some officers arrested during the purges were rehabilitated and returned to command, suggesting a pragmatic if ruthless approach to utilizing military talent when Stalin deemed it necessary. This flexibility, born of desperate circumstances, allowed the Red Army to gradually improve its performance despite the purges' devastating initial impact.

The human cost and institutional devastation

The personal tragedies of the purge were immense. Marshal Alexander Yegorov was arrested in April 1938 and died under torture or was shot in February 1939. His wife was executed in August 1938. Hundreds of senior officers simply disappeared into the gulag system, leaving families uncertain of their fate. The NKVD's introduction of Sippenhaft-style collective punishment meant families of arrested officers faced persecution, creating additional pressure for compliance among those who survived. Officers lived in constant fear, aware that any association with a purge victim might lead to their own arrest. This climate of terror destroyed trust within the military establishment, as officers knew that denouncing colleagues—whether from sincere belief, fear, or ambition—could save oneself while ensuring another's destruction. Many denunciations came from below, as soldiers accused superiors hoping to escape suspicion or advance their own careers.¹⁴

The institutional knowledge destroyed proved irreplaceable in the short term. Tukhachevsky had pioneered deep operations theory and mechanized warfare concepts that the Wehrmacht would employ to devastating effect in 1941. The executed commanders possessed years of experience from the Russian Civil War, the conflicts with Poland and Finland, and the Spanish Civil War where Soviet advisors gained experience in modern warfare. Their replacements were often politically reliable but militarily inexperienced. The quality gap became immediately apparent when the Red Army attacked Finland in the Winter War of 1939-1940. Despite massive numerical superiority, Soviet forces performed poorly against the smaller Finnish army, suffering enormous casualties and revealing serious deficiencies in leadership, training, and tactical competence. These deficiencies stemmed directly from the purges' destruction of experienced leadership.¹⁵

Strategic consequences and the German invasion

Opinions vary on precisely how severely the purges affected Red Army performance in 1941, but the impact was undeniably catastrophic. When Germany launched Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941, the Soviet military was still recovering from the leadership vacuum created by the purges. Many divisions were commanded by officers with insufficient experience for their positions. Command decisions were often hesitant or incompetent. Communication between command levels suffered as inexperienced officers struggled to coordinate large-scale operations. The encirclements at Minsk, Smolensk, Kiev, and Vyazma trapped hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops partly because commanders lacked the experience and confidence to react effectively to rapidly changing tactical situations. In many respects, the heavy losses of the Red Army in the summer and autumn of 1941 can be attributed to deliberately incorrect assessments of enemy defensive power that resulted from the climate of fear the purges created. Officers who might have provided realistic assessments remained silent rather than risk being denounced as defeatist.¹²

The purge's consequences had manifested even earlier in the Winter War with Finland (1939-1940). Stalin's defeat in this conflict came directly from purging his own army. Well over a million well-armed Soviet troops were stalled for months before a thinly defended Finnish line. The Soviet losses were almost unbelievable, with casualty rates far exceeding what competent military leadership should have accepted. This bitter experience pinpointed some of the Red Army's worst shortcomings resulting from the purges and finally resulted in Voroshilov's replacement as defense chief—an event long overdue. However, this belated recognition came too late to prevent the far greater catastrophe that would unfold when Germany attacked. While German operational skill and numerical advantage at key points contributed heavily to Soviet disasters in 1941, the Red Army's leadership deficiencies—traceable directly to the purges—transformed setbacks into catastrophes.¹³

However, the purges' impact was not uniformly negative in the long term. The promotion of new officers eventually began to outstrip discharges, and by 1938 the regime was already rehabilitating some purge victims. The younger officers who rose to replace purge victims included capable commanders like Ivan Konev, Vasily Chuikov, and others who would later distinguish themselves. The purge inadvertently created opportunities for promotion that might not otherwise have existed, accelerating the advancement of a new generation. Additionally, the terror instilled absolute obedience, ensuring that Stalin faced no military challenge to his authority even as the Soviet Union teetered on the brink of defeat. The relationship between Stalin and his commanders was fundamentally different from Hitler's relationship with the Wehrmacht. Where Hitler's generals increasingly doubted his judgment but felt unable to act, Stalin's commanders had seen the consequences of opposition and knew that questioning Stalin meant death.

The contrast with Western civil-military relations

The Red Army purges represented an extreme approach to civil-military relations fundamentally different from democratic traditions. Stalin eliminated any possibility of military opposition not through corruption and cooption but through mass terror. He did not need to bribe his generals because he had demonstrated his willingness to execute them en masse. The institutional memory of 1937-1938 hung over the Red Army throughout World War II and beyond, ensuring that no military figure would dare challenge Party authority. This differed sharply from the Western tradition where professional military officers might disagree with civilian leadership but remained institutionally constrained by democratic norms, constitutional structures, and professional military culture that emphasized civilian control.

Paradoxically, Stalin's terror proved more effective than Hitler's corruption in ensuring absolute control, though at catastrophic cost in military effectiveness. The Wehrmacht maintained some capacity for professional judgment and military expertise despite its corruption and complicity in Nazi crimes. The Red Army after the purges was traumatized and decimated, requiring years to rebuild competence while maintaining absolute political subservience. The purges thus represented an extreme solution to the problem that all authoritarian regimes face regarding their militaries. Stalin's answer was to make the cost of opposition so severe that no one would dare contemplate it, accepting massive damage to military effectiveness as the price for eliminating any threat to his personal power.

Rehabilitation and historical reckoning

The purges' crimes were not fully acknowledged until after Stalin's death in 1953. During the Twenty-Second Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), the regime strongly condemned the crimes and repression of Stalinism and found Voroshilov guilty of reprisals against the command of the Red Army in 1937-1938. Tukhachevsky and other marshals executed in 1937 were officially rehabilitated during Nikita Khrushchev's first de-Stalinization campaign in the mid-1950s. Soviet historians, when permitted to describe the development of the Red Army in the interwar period and the first year of the Great Patriotic War, usually sought to embellish Tukhachevsky's merits while minimizing or obscuring the extent of Stalin's crimes. However, even after rehabilitation, the full truth about the purges remained suppressed until the glasnost period under Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s, when previously sealed archives began to reveal the true magnitude of the terror.¹⁴

Historians have struggled to fully explain why the purges happened with such intensity and at such a strategically inopportune moment. Some suggest this may be a task for students of abnormal psychology rather than for historians, given Stalin's evident paranoia and the absence of any rational military or strategic justification for destroying the Red Army's leadership on the eve of major war. The purges represented the triumph of political paranoia over military rationality, security concerns over strategic necessity, and personal power over institutional competence. No amount of archival research has revealed a genuine military conspiracy that would have justified even a fraction of the bloodshed Stalin inflicted on his own armed forces.

Conclusion

Stalin's military purges stand as one of history's most catastrophic examples of political paranoia destroying institutional competence. The nearly total destruction of the Red Army's experienced leadership on the eve of World War II reflected Stalin's worldview—shaped by Bolshevik revolutionary experience and reinforced by the Great Terror's broader political violence—that saw enemies everywhere and trusted no one. Unlike Hitler's relationship with the Wehrmacht, which combined financial corruption with grudging professional cooperation, Stalin's relationship with the Red Army was based purely on terror. The purges killed many of the Soviet Union's most capable military leaders, devastated institutional knowledge and experience, and created a climate of fear that inhibited professional military judgment. While the Red Army eventually recovered and played the decisive role in defeating Nazi Germany, this achievement came despite the purges rather than because of them. The human cost was immense, the strategic consequences were severe, and the precedent established—that Stalin could liquidate entire institutional leaderships without facing consequences—would shape Soviet governance for decades. The military purges demonstrated that authoritarian paranoia, unrestrained by institutional checks or moral boundaries, could destroy the very instruments of state power it ostensibly sought to protect, leaving the nation vulnerable precisely when it most needed capable leadership.