Library:Trotsky and the Military Conspiracy

Trotsky and the Military Conspiracy: Soviet and Non-Soviet Evidence Evidence; with the Complete Transcript of the "Tukhachevsky Affair" Trial is a 2021 book by historian Grover Furr, published by Erythros Press and Media.

Acknowledgements and Dedication

I wish to express my gratitude to Kevin Prendergast, Arthur Hudson – Arthur, may you enjoy your well-deserved retirement! — and Siobhan McCarthy, the skilled and tireless Inter-Library Loan librarians at Harry S. Sprague Library, Montclair State University.

Without their help, my research would simply not be possible. With their continued help, I can persevere.

I would like to recognise Montclair State University for giving me a sabbatical leave in the fall semester of 2015, and special research travel funds in 2017, 2019, and 2020, which have been invaluable in my research on this book.

This book is dedicated to

Ушкалов Вячеслав Николаевич

Vyacheslav Nikolaevich Ushkalov

The Authorship of This Book

This book is the result of a collective effort. The research has been done primarily by Vladimir L. Bobrov, of Moscow, and secondarily by me, Grover Furr.

Since before he first contacted me in March, 1999, Vladimir Bobrov has been diligently scouring published materials in order to identify and collect primary source evidence and scholarship on the Tukhachevsky Affair. During the past decade, he and a colleague have spent countless hours in the archive of the Federal Security Service, where the records of the former NKVD are stored, locating, reading, and transcribing by hand a great many primary source documents concerning the military conspiracy.

Vladimir has also carefully read and critiqued drafts of this book. I have included most, if not all, of his suggestions in the final text. Without his work, the present book would not have been possible.

Sven-Eric Holström has ably translated the entire transcript of the trial of the defendants in the "Tukhachevsky Affair." I have carefully studied this translation and made a small number of changes.

I have written the text of the book and am responsible for the final draft.

Grover Furr

Montclair, NJ USA

25 November 2020

Foreword: How to Read This Book

The principal document presented here is the complete translation of the transcript of the trial of the defendants in the "Tukhachevsky Affair" – Marshal of the Soviet Union Mikhail N. Tukhachevsky and his seven co-defendants, all top-ranking Red Army officers.

Read this text carefully and – preferably – several times.

Properly understood, this document, and this book, overturn the mainstream history of the Soviet Union, of World War II, and also, in a number of important respects, of the world in the twentieth century.

The other chapters contain confirmatory evidence, with careful and appropriate analysis. They are important, because dishonest historians will claim that Tukhachevsky et al. were not guilty; rather that they were "framed." They will further claim that Leon Trotsky, who is deeply implicated in the Military Conspiracy, was also "framed." These claims are demonstrably false. This book presents the evidence. So these chapters are important.

But read the text carefully. Objective, discerning readers will see for themselves.

Introduction - The Tukhachevsky Affair

On 10 June 1937, the front page of The New York Times broke the story with the following headline:

PURGE OF RED ARMY HINTED IN REMOVAL OF FOUR GENERALS

---

Five Commands Are Changed, Causing Belief Momentous Events Are Occurring

---

TUKHACHEVSKY IS OUSTED

---

Former Marshal Is Thought to Be Under Arrest With Other High Officers

---

TALK OF COUP DISCOUNTED Marshal Budyonny, Close Friend of Stalin, Is Appointed Head of Moscow Military District

Subheads in the body of the article gave more of the shocking details:

Rumors of Arrests Reinforced

All Distinguished Officers

PURGE OF RED ARMY HINTED IN OUSTINGS

Purges Baffle Diplomats

From the beginning, the guilt of the arrested commanders was widely doubted. On 12 June, Leon Trotsky, living in exile in Mexico, once again predicted Stalin's doom:

TROTSKY SEES STALIN NEAR END OF REIGN Says Interests of Defense Have Yielded to Attempts to Save 'the Ruling Clique'

Trotsky was lying. He himself and his supporters outside and especially inside the Soviet Union, were deeply implicated in this conspiracy which, as we shall see, was a joint military-civilian affair. Indeed, Trotsky himself was one of its leaders.

What Happened

During May, 1937, an undetermined number of officers of the Red Army (formal name: Workers and Peasants Red Army, Russian initials RKKA) were arrested in connection with the investigation of a conspiracy involving high-ranking military officers, together with civilian co-conspirators, to sabotage the Red Army and Soviet defences; open the front in the event of war with hostile powers; and to arrest and/or assassinate Soviet leaders, including Stalin and Marshal Kliment E. Voroshilov, People's Commissar for Defence.

The officers of the highest rank who were ultimately tried, convicted, and executed on 11-12 June 1937, were:

Mikhail Nikolaevich Tukhachevsky, one of the five Marshals of the Soviet Union. Tukhachevsky was arrested on 22 May 1937.

Yona Emmanuilovich Yakir, Komandarm 1st rank, arrested on 28 May 1937.

Yeronim Petrovich Uborevich, Komandarm 1st rank, arrested on 29 May 1937.

Avgust Ivanovich Kork, Komandarm 2nd rank, arrested on 12 May 1937.

Robert Petrovich Eideman, Komkor, arrested on 22 May 1937.

Vitovt Kasimirovich Putna, Komkor, arrested on 20 August 1936.

Boris Mironovich Fel'dman, Komkor, arrested on 15 May 1937.

Vitalii Markovich Primakov, Komkor, arrested on 14 August 1936.

Putna had been named by defendants in the second Moscow Trial of January, 1937, as a secret Trotskyist conspirator within the army. Putna had also been mentioned in the first Moscow Trial of August, 1936.

On 20 May 1937, Yan Borisovich Gamarnik, Army Commissar 1st rank, was removed from his post as Chief of the Political Directorate of the Army. On 30 May 1937, the Politburo dismissed him from his military positions because of his "close group ties with Yakir, now expelled from the Party for participation in a military-fascist conspiracy." On 31 May 1937, two officers, acting under Voroshilov's orders, visited Gamarnik at his apartment to inform him that he was being dismissed from the army. When they left, Gamarnik committed suicide by gunshot.

Interrogations of the eight accused continued throughout the last part of May until the trial, which took place on 11 June 1937.

Meanwhile, between 1 June and 4 June 1937, an enlarged session of the Military Soviet (Council) with the People's Commissar for Defence was held in Moscow. The transcript of the discussions was published in 2008. Its purpose was to explain to high-ranking military officers the evidence against the eight commanders in what would come to be known as the "Tukhachevsky Affair;" to present them with that evidence in written form; and to hear what they had to say about it.

The documents presented, evidently in multiple copies, to the officers who attended the Military Soviet, are listed in the transcript of the enlarged session of the Military Soviet. On 1 June 1937, the first day of the meeting, the officers in attendance, 173 of them, were given copies of the confession statements of Tukhachevsky, Kork, Fel'dman, and Yefimov. Other materials may have been distributed after 1 June – an excerpt from a 2 June 1937 confession by Putna is included in the published transcript of the session of the Military Soviet. As of 2020, most of the investigative materials are now available to researchers at the FSB archive in Moscow.

Interrogators of and confessions by these eight men evidently continued right up until 10 June 1937, the day before the trial. On 11 June the eight former commanders were put on trial by a military court consisting of high-ranking officers. The accused and the judges were all well acquainted with one another. The presiding judge was Vasilii Vasil'evich Ul'rikh, an Old Bolshevik and a trained and experienced jurist.

The trial took place on 11 June 1937. All eight defendants confessed, were convicted, and sentenced to execution. They were shot on 12 June 1937. The transcript of this trial is the primary document presented in the present book.

Soviet Archival Documents

Since the end of the Soviet Union in late December, 1991, a great many documents from former Soviet archives have been published. Beginning as a relative trickle, a decade later the total number of former Soviet documents published had become a flood, one that continues until the present day. These documents demand a complete revision of the history of the Soviet Union during the time when Joseph Stalin was in the leadership, roughly 1929 to 1953.

In Russia today there is a law according to which secret documents are to be made public after the passage of 75 years. 2012 marked seventy-five years since the Tukhachevsky Affair. By 2012, many interrogations, statements, and confessions of military men accused of involvement in the military-civilian conspiracy had indeed been declassified.

In 2015 historian Vladimir L. Bobrov, together with a colleague, applied to the archive of the FSB, the agency that is the direct descendent of the OGPU-NKVD-KGB, to request that the transcript of the Tukhachevsky trial be declassified and made available for study. The FSB archive refused, stating that the case was still under investigation by the prosecutor's office.

The Trial Transcript Declassified

In May 2018, a copy of the trial transcript held in a different archive, RGASPI, the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, was silently published by being placed on two web pages, one in Ukraine, the other in Russia. This is the text we present here, in English translation. We still do not have access to the copy held in the FSB archive.

The trial transcript is contained in several different archival volumes. Volume 16 ("tom 16") is the first typewritten transcript of the handwritten transcripts recorded by stenographers. It contains only light editing. Volume 17 ("tom 17"), also a typescript of the transcript, contains copious revisions in blue, red, green ink and pencil. The version from the RGASPI archive, which we translate here, is a retyped version of volume 17.

Other Arrests and Trials of Military Men

The trial transcript makes it clear that many other officers were involved in this conspiracy. Today there is a massive amount of evidence to this effect – so much, indeed, that a multi-volume set would be needed to contain it all. We will cover a very small part of this evidence in some of the chapters in this book.

A great many officers were either charged with serious crimes or dismissed from the military under a cloud of suspicion. A significant number were put on trial and either executed or sentenced to terms in a labour camp. Some were acquitted. Others were arrested, held during an investigation, and ultimately released.

A great deal of material has now been declassified and is available to researchers. It is likely that all, or almost all, of the investigative materials on thousands of officers who were under investigation, is still extant and could be accessed and studied by researchers.

But it appears that there is very little research being conducted on these men, or on the subject of the military conspiracy generally.

The main reason for this neglect is the fact that the question of the military conspiracy is widely considered a "closed book." Tukhachevsky and his seven co-defendants have long since been declared to have been innocent victims of a frame-up by Stalin. There is no indication that the mainstream historical profession in Russia or elsewhere is willing to revisit these events, regardless of how much evidence of their guilt we now have.

The Anti-Stalin Paradigm

Refusal to be objective – to consider the possibility that not just the Tukhachevsky Affair defendants, but many other military officers, may have indeed been guilty, to decide the matter of guilt or innocent on the basis of evidence rather than of preconceived ideas, outright bias, or political expediency – is a product of the anticommunism, in the form of anti-Stalinism.

Leon Trotsky did his best to demonise Stalin – to accuse him of every conceivable crime, always without any evidence – in order to further his, Trotsky's, own anti-Soviet conspiracies and his collaboration with Nazi Germany and militarist Japan, and with fascists, German spies, and his own followers within the Soviet Union. After Stalin's death Nikita Khrushchev falsely accused Stalin of many crimes in his famous "Secret Speech" to the XX Party Congress of 25 February 1956. Thanks to evidence from former Soviet archives we now know that all of Khrushchev's accusations against Stalin in that speech are false, most of them deliberate lies.

At the XXII Party Congress in October, 1961, Khrushchev sponsored further accusations against Stalin, some of them citing evidence that we can now show was false. After the XXII Congress, Khrushchev sponsored a virtual avalanche of dishonest writings, disguised as history but devoid of evidence, in which Stalin was accused of yet more crimes. This wave of anti-Stalin fabrications ceased shortly after Khrushchev was ousted in October, 1964.

Beginning in 1987 Mikhail Gorbachev, the final leader of the Soviet Union, launched an even more fierce attack on Stalin, again with the aid of phony historians and with either falsified evidence or no evidence at all. This last anti-Stalin onslaught has continued to the present day.

The unwritten rules of this Anti-Stalin Paradigm (ASP) include the following: It is considered illegitimate to question Stalin's guilt in any crime he has been charged with in the past, regardless of the evidence now available. Confirmation bias, "the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information that confirms or support one's prior beliefs or values," trumps evidence, trumps the truth, trumps everything.

In 1956, shortly after his "Secret Speech," Khrushchev assigned a commission under the chairmanship of Vyacheslav Molotov, a long-time close associate of Stalin's, to investigate some of the crimes that Khrushchev had accused Stalin of. The Molotov Commission included a few other longtime Stalin supporters, but also some Khrushchev loyalists. The result was that the commission could not agree that the defendants in the three Moscow Trials had been innocent. But it did "rehabilitate" the principal defendants in the Tukhachevsky Affair, although it cited no evidence in doing so.

Just prior to the XXII Party Congress Khrushchev appointed another commission under the chairmanship of another Old Bolshevik, Nikolai Shvernik, and composed solely of Khrushchev loyalists and Stalin-haters. This commission investigated the Tukhachevsky Affair again, and again found the defendants innocent. Once again, they were unable to find any evidence of innocence, and were forced to falsify the evidence that they did cite. We examine some of the falsifications of the Shvernik Commission in the present book.

My Road to the Tukhachevsky Affair

I first became interested in the Tukhachevsky Affair in the 1970s. At a huge demonstration in Manhattan in 1967 against the U.S. Invasion of Vietnam, I was told by a friendly but clearly anticommunist onlooker that I should not oppose the American war in Vietnam. Why not? I asked. Because – came the answer – the Vietnamese nationalists were led by the Communist Party, the Communist Party was led by Ho Chi Minh, Ho had been trained by Joseph Stalin, and "Stalin had murdered 20 million people."

I did not believe this – but neither did I disbelieve or dismiss it. In 1968 Robert Conquest published The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the 'Thirties. I was still curious about the claim that Stalin was a mass murderer, so in the early 1970s I read Conquest's book very carefully. From my study of mediaeval literature, I knew not to take the fact-claims of "experts" on trust, but to always scrutinise the primary-source evidence. So I paid particularly close attention to Conquest's footnotes – where the evidence is. Or, rather, where it is supposed to be.

I had a contradictory reaction to Conquest's book. On the one hand, I was shocked and troubled by the enormous number of accusations of terrible crimes that Conquest levelled at Stalin. On the other hand, I noted that Conquest cited little – if indeed any – primary-source evidence to support his sweeping allegations against Stalin and the Soviets.

Once I was securely situated in my new college teaching job and had completed most of the research for my doctoral dissertation, I set about checking Conquest's book further with the resources of the New York Public Library. I created a 3x5 file card for every citation that Conquest used in The Great Terror and I systematically checked all of them. What I discovered was enlightening. Conquest had no primary source evidence. All of the materials he cited as "evidence" were assertions by Soviet or Western anticommunist writers. I noted especially the fact that the Soviet references also had no evidence.

When I completed by doctoral dissertation in 1978, I determined that I would do some serious research on the "Great Terror." I decided to concentrate on the Tukhachevsky Affair because it seemed to me that there was more information available about it than about the other alleged "crimes of Stalin" in Conquest's book. I began to collect articles and books, and to make notes.

In 1980 I obtained a copy of J. Arch Getty's doctoral dissertation, which he had completed at Boston College the previous year. I read it with enthusiasm. Here was a younger scholar who really knew how to use evidence, and who saw through many of the falsifications that were spread around as "truth" by mainstream scholars like Conquest.

I met Getty, and he suggested that I draft an article for a journal, Russian History / Histoire Russe, for which he was one of the editors. I did this, and after many rewrites, Getty recommended it for publication. But the publisher of the journal, Charles Schlacks, rejected my article on the grounds that "it made Stalin look good." Of course, my article did not do that at all. But it did conclude that the accepted version of Tukhachevsky's innocence was not supported by any evidence, and that in fact we did not know whether Tukhachevsky was innocent or not. The publisher found such responsible, scholarly caution to be unacceptable.

But Getty stood up for my article. He told the publisher that it must be published, because it had gone through a very careful vetting by himself and some colleagues. The publisher backed down. But when the article was published, in 1988 (the issue is dated 1986), the prefatory essay to the issue contained an introductory paragraph discussing every article – except mine! This was my first exposure to what I now call the Anti-Stalin Paradigm.

In 1996 I learnt how to create a simple web page. On it I put retyped versions of all the articles I had published by that time, including the 1986/88 article on Tukhachevsky. In March 1999 I received an email from Vladimir L'vovich Bobrov in Moscow about my article. He told me the article was good but that it should be updated by the study of some of the many documents from former Soviet archives that had begun to appear in Russia.

Vladimir had been collecting and retyping documents related to the Tukhachevsky Affair and generously shared them with me. He wanted us to write an article or a book about it. I agreed, and for a while I did some work on it. But then I stumbled across evidence that Nikita Khrushchev had lied – indeed, had virtually done nothing but lie – in his famous "Secret Speech." So I stopped working on Tukhachevsky and began years of researching and writing on other important questions of Soviet history of the Stalin period, beginning with Khrushchev Lied.

In 2007-8 I undertook a systematic review of all the documents in the Volkogonov Archive pertaining to the Stalin years. I discovered a report by Marshal Semyon Budyonny to Marshal Voroshilov in which Budyonny, a member of the judicial panel, describes the Tukhachevsky trial. This document was classified – secret, unavailable to researchers – in Russia at that time. In 2012 Vladimir and I published this document in the St. Petersburg historical journal Klio. Our article, including our analysis of Budyonny's letter and how it has been dishonestly described over the years, is also available online, though only in Russian.

Now that the transcript of the trial has been made public, along with a great many other documents relating to the military conspiracy, it is time to return to the Tukhachevsky Affair.

— Grover Furr, 2020

The Trial Transcript

The main feature of this book is the presentation of a complete English translation of the transcript of the trial of Tukhachevsky and his seven co-conspirators. This translation was expertly done by my Swedish colleague and fine historian Sven-Eric Holström. I take responsibility for its accuracy, since I have gone over it and corrected it on some minor points.