Mikhail Tukhachevsky

Biography

Mikhail Nikolaevich Tukhachevsky was born on February 16, 1893, in Aleksandrovskoye, Smolensk Province, into a minor noble family. He was perhaps the most brilliant and modern-minded military mind produced by the Russian Civil War — a man who revolutionized Soviet military doctrine, built the Red Army into a formidable modern force, and was then shot by the regime he had served with such distinction. Tukhachevsky entered the Aleksandrovsky Military Academy in 1912 and was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Semyonovsky Guards — one of the most elite regiments in the Imperial Army. In 1914 he went to the front as a young officer, earned six decorations in five months of fighting, and was captured by the Germans in February 1915. He escaped five times from German prisoner-of-war camps — on the fifth attempt he succeeded, crossing Germany into Switzerland and returning to Russia. This background of elite tsarist service, intellectual brilliance, and personal courage made him an ideal recruit for the Red Army. He joined the Bolsheviks in 1918 and immediately showed extraordinary military talent. At twenty-five years old he was commanding an army; at twenty-six he commanded the Eastern Front. His campaigns against Kolchak and the White forces in Siberia in 1919 were masterpieces of mobile warfare. His failure in the Polish-Soviet War — where his army was shattered at Warsaw — was the great stain on his record, but the defeat owed much to Budyonny's failure to support his flank, which Stalin later covered up. His suppression of the Tambov peasant uprising (1921) was militarily efficient but morally horrifying, using poison gas against Russian peasant villages. In the 1920s and early 1930s Tukhachevsky became the primary architect of Soviet military modernization, developing the doctrine of 'deep battle' — a theory of simultaneous strikes across the entire depth of an enemy's front, coordinating tanks, aircraft, artillery, and infantry in ways that anticipated Blitzkrieg. He was appointed Marshal of the Soviet Union in 1935. Then in June 1937, Stalin had him arrested on fabricated charges of treason and espionage. He was tortured until he signed a confession, subjected to a one-day secret trial, and shot the same evening. He was forty-four years old. His 'deep battle' doctrine was later rediscovered and vindicated in the Second World War.

Key Battles