But at the time, the controversy soon began to seem minor and academic. Compared with the true political virulences then prevailing, the Army gradually became a quiet area amid the storms of Soviet political life.
In the 1920s, Communists in the armed forces were at first strongly and openly involved in the political arguments of the time. Antonov-Ovseenko, Head of the Army Political Administration, had been forthrightly Trotskyite. Lashevich, the Zinovievite Deputy Commissar for War, had actually held a more or less secret oppositionist meeting in a wood while still at his post.
But later, this sort of overt action ceased. For a time, Army Communists still entered, though more discreetly than the civilians, into the controversies of the time. Putna was among the officers signing some sort of confidential defense of the opposition in 1927.7 Tukhachevsky had not been involved in this, or any similar move. We may make a certain distinction between the professional soldiers who became Communists, like Tukhachevsky, Kork, and Yegorov, and the Communists who became professional soldiers, like Yakir, Blyukher, and Alksnis. Even at this time, the former played little part in politics—except when military matters were directly affected, as when Tukhachevsky and Uborevich opposed Trotsky’s ideas of Army organization.
But in any case, from the establishment of Stalin’s primacy at the end of the 1920s, the Army Command had wholly withdrawn from the political struggle. In part, this was evidently due to the same ideas that decided Pyatakov: the leadership question was settled. What remained was the professional problem of creating a sound military force. And, conversely, Stalin had been careful not to stir up trouble among the soldiery. Just as he had “neutralized” the Ukraine by withdrawing Kaganovich in 1928, so he now left Tukhachevsky and his fellows a comparatively free hand. The Army’s Communists had a high reputation in the Party. In the comparatively mild Party purge of 1929, some 5 percent of military Communists were purged, compared with 11.7 percent in the Party as a whole; in the 1933 purge, the figures were 4.3 percent and 17 percent, respectively.
It is true that an occasional officer suffered. But this was usually a special case, like that of the military academic Snesarev, formerly a Tsarist general, since rehabilitated. “In January 1930, on a charge of having participated in a counter-revolutionary monarchist officers’ organization, he was arrested along with other military specialists,” and at the age of sixty-five was deported to hard labor in the far north, where he died in 1937.8
But on the whole, the Army received more and more friendly attention, and less and less persecution. Its prestige began to be built up in a variety of ways. The principle of shared responsibility between the commander and the political commissar was abolished in March 1934, leaving the commander in full control, with the commissar simply as his political adviser. The old military ranks up to, but not including, general, were restored on 22 September 1935. The same decree gave all except junior commanders the privilege of immunity from arrest by the civil organs without a special authorization from the People’s Commissar of Defense. At the same time, the first five Marshals of the Soviet Union were named: Tukhachevsky, Blyukher, and Yegorov of the genuine military, plus Stalin’s nominees Voroshilov and Budenny.
At his trial in 1938, Bukharin was to speak vaguely of the “military men” among his fellow plotters. When Vyshinsky asked, “Which military men?” he answered, “The Right conspirators.” Vyshinsky, accepting this, asked for the names in the particular context, and was given those of Tukhachevsky and Kork.9 In his speaking of them as not simply members of the far-flung “bloc” but as actual Rightists, we can perhaps find a clue to part of the reason for Stalin’s resentment of the military. They had not been Rightists in the sense that Bukharin was. But it is more than likely that they had shown Rightism, in the sense that Rudzutak, Chubar, and so on had done—that is, in failing to show enthusiasm for the increasing tempo of the purge during the final phase, from September 1936 to February 1937.
Not that we can so simply exhaust Stalin’s motives. Former grudges and present nuisance value certainly played a part. But there are more general, and more powerful, considerations.
Despotism enforced by a terrorist and terrorized bureaucracy may be in a general way extremely strong. But it presents certain points of vulnerability. There is a brittleness in the strength. Even the most rigorous precautions can never entirely rule out the possibility of assassination. There is no real evidence of any serious attempt on Stalin’s life. There are a few vague reports of genuine plots, usually among young Communists, discovered before they came to fruition. And there are one or two individual incidents, such as that reported during the Second World War of a soldier who shot at random at a car emerging from the Kremlin which chanced to contain Mikoyan.10
The other vulnerability was to a military coup. Even a few dozen determined men might conceivably have seized the Kremlin and the persons of the leadership. And in those circumstances, the type of machine Stalin built can crack very easily. Even the farcical attempt by General Malet to overthrow Napoleon in 1812, by sheer bluff, had an almost incredible measure of preliminary success. The best chance of getting rid of Stalin would have been a coup by Tukhachevsky in alliance with the surviving oppositionists, just as the best chance of blocking Hitler in 1933 would have been a coup by Schleicher backed by the Social Democratic Party.
But just as the German Social Democrats were hobbled by their notions of constitutionality (and just as, later, most of Hitler’s generals were hamstrung by their formal allegiance to Hitler as Head of State), the Soviet Marshals, like the civilian oppositionists, seem to have been mesmerized by the notion that the Stalin leadership, with all its faults, had inherited the Party legitimacy.
For there is no evidence that any conspiracy really existed. Isaac Deutscher has indeed written that “all non-Stalinist versions concur in the following: the Generals did indeed plan a coup d’ état.”11 In reality, there is virtual unanimity that this was not the case. The leading defector information (including that deriving from NKVD officers in prison who discussed the matter with cell mates who eventually came West)12 and later Soviet revelations all agree on the nonexistence of any plot. The Nazi secret archives contain no evidence of anything of the kind. Admittedly, one cannot prove a negative, and we must not formally exclude the possibility of evidence one day turning up to show that some of the military were seriously considering action.fn4 But it seems unlikely, to say the least. The curious thing is that the legend of a real conspiracy long persisted, though the “conspiracies” alleged at the three great political trials either were rejected from the start or have long since been seen through.
The reason, paradoxically, seems to be that this is the one case in which Stalin did not produce his evidence. From Stalin’s point of view, it was the best method. If a real military plot had suddenly been discovered, immediate court-martial and execution were natural-looking reactions. They had many precedents in other countries and, indeed, in Russia. Moreover, while the likelihood of the plots hitherto exposed in court was on the face of it dubious, the seizure of power by Tukhachevsky appeared a perfectly rational and possible move. In this case, public “proofs” were not required. In a sense, this is itself a curious irony, as this is the only case in which Stalin did dispose of documentary evidence. It was, of course, faked, but it really was of German origin.