Subversion in the Red Army and the Military Purge of 1937–1938

Stalin's purge of his military elite during 1937–1938 is one of the most unusual events of the Great Terror. Why would Stalin execute his most qualified officers at the same time as defence spending was rising and a world war was approaching? This article argues that a long history of the Red Army being perceived as vulnerable to subversion is central to understanding this military purge. When faced with perceived plots in the military Stalin tended to lean towards restraint, but by 1937 he felt he could no longer hesitate, and finally cracked down on what he saw as a compromised army

The Purge of the Red Army and the Soviet Mass Operations 1937-1938

This article explores the possible connections between Stalin's purge of the Red Army, sanctioned in June 1937, and the Soviet mass operations, launched just weeks later. It argues that Stalin ordered the military purge to combat a misperceived threat from foreign agents in the Red Army that had become a pressing issue in the early months of 1937. The article makes the case that, once launched, the military purge provided the catalyst for the mass operations as the regime sought not only to destroy a ‘fifth column’ in the Red Army, but soon turned attention to the wider population

In the Shadow of the War: Bolshevik Perceptions of Polish Subversive and Military Threats to the Soviet Union, 1920-32

This article examines Soviet perceptions of subversive and military threats from Poland to the Soviet Union in the 1920s and early 1930s. Drawing on archival materials from the Soviet foreign ministry, Communist Party leadership and security organs, it shows how the Soviet leadership held exaggerated fears about Polish threats to the Soviet western border regions and military intervention. A pattern of misperception stemmed from the Bolshevik defeat to Poland in the 1919-1920 Soviet-Polish War, which rather than moderating the early Soviet regime ultimately encouraged more widespread use of state violence and provided further rationale for Stalin’s ‘Revolution from Above’

The state of the Martian climate

60°N was +2.0°C, relative to the 1981–2010 average value (Fig. 5.1). This marks a new high for the record. The average annual surface air temperature (SAT) anomaly for 2016 for land stations north of starting in 1900, and is a significant increase over the previous highest value of +1.2°C, which was observed in 2007, 2011, and 2015. Average global annual temperatures also showed record values in 2015 and 2016. Currently, the Arctic is warming at more than twice the rate of lower latitudes

Mark Edele, Stalin’s Defectors: How Red Army Soldiers became Hitler’s Collaborators, 1941-1945

Mark Edele, Stalin’s Defectors: How Red Army Soldiers became Hitler’s Collaborators, 1941-1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. ISBN: 978-0198798156 (hardback). 224pp. Price £60.00

The Soviet-Polish War and its Legacy: Lenin’s Defeat and the Rise of Stalinism

This detailed study traces the history of the Soviet-Polish War (1919-20), the first major international clash between the forces of communism and anti-communism, and the impact this had on Soviet Russia in the years that followed. It reflects upon how the Bolsheviks fought not only to defend the fledgling Soviet state, but also to bring the revolution to Europe. Peter Whitewood shows that while the Red Army's rapid drive to the gates of Warsaw in summer 1920 raised great hopes for world revolution, the subsequent collapse of the offensive had a more striking result. The Soviet military and political leadership drew the mistaken conclusion that they had not been defeated by the Polish Army, but by the forces of the capitalist world – Britain and France – who were perceived as having directed the war behind-the-scenes. They were taken aback by the strength of the forces of counterrevolution and convinced they had been overcome by the capitalist powers

The Red Army and the Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Soviet Military

On June 11, 1937, a closed military court ordered the execution of a group of the Soviet Union's most talented and experienced army officers, including Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevskii; all were charged with participating in a Nazi plot to overthrow the regime of Joseph Stalin. There followed a massive military purge, from the officer corps through the rank-and-file, that many consider a major factor in the Red Army's dismal performance in confronting the German invasion of June 1941. Why take such action on the eve of a major war? The most common theory has Stalin fabricating a "military conspiracy" to tighten his control over the Soviet state. In The Red Army and the Great Terror, Peter Whitewood advances an entirely new explanation for Stalin's actions—an explanation with the potential to unlock the mysteries that still surround the Great Terror, the surge of political repression in the late 1930s in which over one million Soviet people were imprisoned in labor camps and over 750,000 executed. Framing his study within the context of Soviet civil-military relations dating back to the 1917 revolution, Whitewood shows that Stalin sanctioned this attack on the Red Army not from a position of confidence and strength, but from one of weakness and misperception. Here we see how Stalin's views had been poisoned by the paranoid accusations of his secret police, who saw spies and supporters of the dead Tsar everywhere and who had long believed that the Red Army was vulnerable to infiltration by foreign intelligence agencies engaged in a conspiracy against the Soviet state. Recently opened Russian archives allow Whitewood to counter the accounts of Soviet defectors and conspiracy theories that have long underpinned conventional wisdom on the military purge. By broadening our view, The Red Army and the Great Terror demonstrates not only why Tukhachevskii and his associates were purged in 1937, but also why tens of thousands of other officers and soldiers were discharged and arrested at the same time. With its thorough reassessment of these events, the book sheds new light on the nature of power, state violence, and civil-military relations under the Stalinist regime