Chapter 140: Regret

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Even as he was being dragged by the guards, Tukhachevsky still tried to argue. “I am Marshal Tukhachevsky! I am a Marshal of the Red Army! You cannot imprison me without cause! I want to go to Moscow! I want to see Stalin! I have made many sacrifices and contributions for the Soviet Union, for the Red Army. Now you shamefully arrest me. One day, you will face retribution!”

The lieutenant colonel leading the way had a triumphant look on his face. He sneered and said contemptuously, “Just another traitor. We’ve never had a shortage of your kind here. Hmph, I’ll face retribution? You should worry about yourself first!”

“I want paper and a pen! I want to write a letter to Comrade Stalin! I want to send a message to my friends in Moscow! You cannot deprive a marshal of his right to write letters.” Tukhachevsky knew that if he wanted to live, he had to contact his old comrades and friends. At the very least, the party elders in Moscow had to know what had happened.

“You still want to write letters? Right now, all your friends are writing letters to Comrade Stalin! I can even tell you the contents of their letters! They are all busy drawing a clear line between themselves and a traitor like you!” The lieutenant colonel kicked Tukhachevsky into the cell, and the guards subsequently shut the prison door. The lieutenant colonel said shamelessly through the bars, “Just wait for death!”

As the men left and their footsteps faded away, Tukhachevsky finally calmed down and began to examine his cell. The walls were covered with mottled stains. A marshal had likely never been housed here before. He felt his pockets and found a pack of cigarettes, but unfortunately, he had no matches.

Tukhachevsky gave a cold laugh and found a place to sit down, his mind filled with the events of the past few years. Is this my motherland? Is this the cause I have fought for my entire life? Framing the loyal, eliminating dissent! Utterly disregarding justice and reason, to stoop to framing a comrade-in-arms for one’s own selfish gain!

On the basis of a single letter of denunciation and a piece of intelligence brought back from Germany, a highly decorated and seasoned old proletarian revolutionary was thrown into prison. They had even skipped the process of differentiation and interrogation. How childish and despicable!

When the mass arrests were taking place in the country and in the army, he could feel Stalin’s gloomy gaze upon him. In such a situation, Tukhachevsky could not help but be tormented by a premonition of danger. When he learned of the arrest of Corps Commander B.M. Feldman, who had worked with him in Leningrad and served as his chief of staff, he had even defended his comrade, saying, “This is a large-scale provocation and sowing of discord.”

Unfortunately, he himself had now been arrested. He wondered if anyone would defend him in the same way.

However, the “sowing of discord” he had spoken of was still continuing. Just two days after his arrest, the court convened for his trial. On that very day, the judges eagerly tried the “criminal Tukhachevsky clique,” sentencing Tukhachevsky and seven other important military personnel to death: Army Commander 1st Rank Ieronim Uborevich and Iona Yakir; Army Commander 2nd Rank August Kork; and Corps Commanders Vitaly Primakov, Vitovt Putna, Robert Eydeman, and Boris Feldman.

During the trial, Tukhachevsky was not even allowed to appear in court to defend himself. A former comrade of his appeared in court to testify that he had used erroneous methods to weaken the combat effectiveness of the Red Army. This comrade declared that he had “rapidly built up the tank corps at the expense of reducing the number of cavalry and cavalry expenditures.”

The court used this as criminal evidence to corroborate the charge that Tukhachevsky had colluded with Germany in an attempt to subvert Stalin. This brings to mind the beautiful lines from Sergei Yesenin’s poem:

Have you seen

How the train rushes across the steppe

On its iron paws,

Racing through the hazy mist by the lake,

Snorting with its steel nostrils?

And behind it,

In the deep grass,

Like a desperate race at a festival,

A red-maned colt gallops wildly,

Its slender legs flinging forward.

What a lovely and ridiculous fool,

Where, oh where, is it chasing?

Does it not know that the living horse

Has been utterly defeated by the steel horse?

This poem was written in 1920… I have to say, this is truly strange. For a sensitive lyric poet who was nostalgic for the Russia of the past, for a famous peasant poet, for a poet who was born with a love for “our little people,” the outcome of the debate between the living horse and the iron horse was already completely clear back in 1920. Yet some military men and politicians were still wavering between cavalry and tanks.

In fact, the German intelligence service’s attempt to use a frame-up to eliminate the troublesome commander of the Soviet Red Army, Marshal Tukhachevsky, was ultimately successful. Stalin used the knife arranged by Germany to get rid of the Tukhachevsky faction in the military that had long threatened him, seizing firm control of the Red Army in one fell swoop.

However, the plan to use the Tukhachevsky case to strike at Soviet industrial talent and weaken the Soviet government’s talent pool was easily seen through. Because of the rush to expand the Soviet purge, too many fake documents were created, which undermined their credibility. This prevented Stalin from expanding the purge to the technical departments. Although a few designers were arrested due to their connection with Tukhachevsky, the foundation of Soviet industrial talent was not fundamentally harmed.

In fact, it is not difficult to see that because the German and Soviet high commands signed a secret agreement in 1926, according to which the Junkers company would provide technical assistance for the establishment of the Soviet Air Force, Tukhachevsky, who was the Chief of Staff of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army at the time, naturally had to have professional contact with German officers.

Tukhachevsky’s personal signature was on the 1926 agreement. This made it possible to forge his signature and create fake letters. From the letters, it appeared that Tukhachevsky and his “accomplices” had reached an agreement to break free from civilian control and seize state power. The fake letters bore various genuine seals of the German intelligence agency, the “Gestapo,” such as “Top Secret” and “Confidential.” However, the content of these documents did not involve any substantive operational plans.

Therefore, it was obviously impossible to deceive the entire Soviet Union with such a baseless document. But for a motivated person like Stalin, it was more than sufficient to complete the suppression and handling of other factions.

On the night Tukhachevsky was awaiting his execution, an unexpected event occurred. A prison guard knocked on his cell door.

“Good evening, Marshal Tukhachevsky!” The prison guard had a faint smile on his face and a harmless appearance. “I am an agent sent by the German Gestapo. If you are willing to cooperate, leave this place with us! We will send you to Berlin, Germany, where you will be very safe.”

Tukhachevsky raised an eyebrow, looked at the prison guard, and gave a self-deprecating smile. “Thank you. It seems the Führer was telling the truth when he said he didn’t want to face me directly. He would rather help that little man Stalin defeat me in this way!”

“The Führer also did not wish to meet you on the battlefield, Marshal. He was forced to take advantage of Stalin’s prejudice against you. However, the Führer greatly admires your talent, Marshal, and will certainly treat you better than Stalin,” the prison guard said, finding the key to the cell door and trying to insert it into the lock.

“You people are truly everywhere! To think that there are so many of your spies on our great Soviet land!” Tukhachevsky said with a bitter smile.

“Actually, not as many as you might think!” the prison guard said with a smile as he inserted the key into the lock. “I am part of an action team, specializing in this sort of thing. I knocked out a guard and put on his uniform to get in. It wasn’t easy to get here, and if we’re discovered, the few people covering us outside will likely suffer some losses. You think we have a spy in every prison? That’s giving us too much credit. Hehe.”

“Don’t bother! I will not go to Germany! I am a communist. I will never surrender to the bourgeoisie. A heroic death is better than an ignoble life!” Tukhachevsky shook his head, stopping the guard’s action. “Give a message to your Führer for me. Tell him I regret not being able to fight him on the battlefield.”

“Will you… not reconsider?” the prison guard asked again, his voice filled with regret.

“I’m tired… You should go.” After saying this, Tukhachevsky lay back down on the single cot in his cell.

Germany’s attempt to bring Tukhachevsky back to Berlin ended in failure because the marshal himself refused to cooperate—a stark irony given the crimes he was being tried for. The next morning, Yezhov’s men summarily executed the highly decorated Marshal of the Red Army.

Just three days later, Tukhachevsky’s wife and children were also sentenced to death on charges of espionage and treason. The once-prominent family of a marshal thus vanished from the long scroll of history.

After killing Tukhachevsky and his wife and children, Yezhov and his subordinates began to arrest his friends, relatives, and colleagues. When a staff member of the NKVD saw a portrait of the marshal on the wall of an arrested person’s home, he asked in surprise, “Why haven’t you taken that down yet?”

“No…” the arrested person replied. “You should know, one day, people will build monuments to him.”

This bold friend of the marshal did not live to see the day Tukhachevsky was rehabilitated. He and his family were packed onto a train bound for a Siberian concentration camp the very next day. By the time the train reached its freezing destination in Siberia, of his family of thirteen, only two emaciated children were left.