1. Why the phenomenon’s survival into the modern age matters
The cases examined to this point belong to the ancient, medieval, and early modern worlds, to monarchies, city-states, and dynastic empires whose institutions and assumptions are remote from those of the modern age. A reader might suppose that the phenomenon is a relic of those older orders, a hazard of personal monarchy and dynastic insecurity that the modern bureaucratic state, with its rationalized institutions, its professional armies, and its mechanisms of accountability, would have outgrown. The Tukhachevsky case refutes that supposition, and its refutation is the first and principal reason the suite gives it the place of the final case study, the demonstration that the phenomenon survives into the twentieth century and into the modern totalitarian state, and survives not in a softened form but in an intensified one, equipped with the instruments that the modern state had developed and that made the destruction of the deliverer more thorough, more systematic, and more lethal than the older orders could achieve.
The modern state did not soften the phenomenon; it industrialized it. The same fear of the over-capable and popular soldier that had thrown Saul’s spear and convened Yue Fei’s tribunal was now equipped with a secret police of vast reach, with techniques of interrogation and fabrication refined into a system, with the apparatus of the show trial that could manufacture confessions and stage the appearance of justice on a scale the older regimes could not approach, and with a totalitarian control of information and society that allowed the destruction of the deliverer to be accompanied by the destruction of the entire officer corps of which he was the foremost. The phenomenon in the modern case is the phenomenon of all the earlier cases, the same fear, the same convertibility, the same legal form serving a predetermined end, but pressed through the machinery of the modern state into a destruction more comprehensive and more devastating than any the suite has examined, and this intensification is the modern case’s distinctive contribution, the demonstration that the modern state, far from outgrowing the phenomenon, gave it instruments that made it deadlier.
The second reason the case belongs is the clarity and the catastrophic scale of its self-defeat, for the destruction of Tukhachevsky was not the removal of a single deliverer but the decapitation of the officer corps of a great army on the eve of the largest war in history, and the cost of that destruction, paid in the catastrophes of the war’s opening period, is the suite’s most enormous demonstration of the self-defeating character of the regime’s fear. Where the late Roman court lost Rome and the Korean court lost a fleet, the Soviet state, in destroying Tukhachevsky and the officers who fell with him, gutted the leadership of the army that would have to meet the German invasion, and paid for it in the disasters of that war’s first year, a cost measured in the loss of vast armies and territories and in deaths beyond counting.
The third reason is the bloodstained confession from which this paper takes its title, the physical evidence of the fabrication and the torture that produced the case against the marshal, for the surviving record of Tukhachevsky’s confession is reported to bear the stains of his own blood, the mark of the violence by which the confession was extracted, and this physical trace of the torture is the modern case’s equivalent of Qin Hui’s confession that the charge against Yue Fei was a thing that perhaps existed, the tangible proof that the legal form was empty and the destruction predetermined.
2. The deliverance: the saving of the regime and the building of the army
The deliverance Tukhachevsky rendered, the first criterion of the phenomenon, was twofold, his service in the civil war that established and secured the Bolshevik regime, and his subsequent work in building and modernizing the Red Army into a force capable of the warfare the coming conflict would demand, and the two together made him both a savior of the regime in its founding struggle and the principal architect of the army on which its survival in the next war would depend (Conquest, 2008; Erickson, 2001).
In the civil war that followed the Bolshevik revolution, when the new regime fought for its existence against the various forces arrayed against it, Tukhachevsky rose to high command and rendered the regime the service of a capable general in the struggle that secured its survival, his commands contributing to the victories by which the Bolshevik state established and defended itself (Conquest, 2008; Erickson, 2001). His service in this founding struggle placed him among the soldiers who had saved the regime in its infancy, the generals whose capability had defended the new state against the forces that sought to destroy it, and it gave him the standing of a hero of the civil war, one of the founding military figures of the Soviet state.
His more consequential deliverance, though it was the building of a capability against a future war rather than the winning of a present one, was his work in modernizing the Red Army and developing the military theory and the forces that the coming war would require. Tukhachevsky was the foremost military thinker and reformer of the Soviet army, the architect of its modernization, the developer of the theories of mechanized and deep warfare that anticipated the character of the war to come, and the builder of the forces and the doctrines that would be needed to meet a modern enemy (Erickson, 2001; Butson, 1984). His work made the Red Army a more capable and more modern force than it had been, and his theories anticipated the kind of warfare that the next war would demand, so that his contribution was the building of the very capability on which the regime’s survival in that war would depend. The first criterion is met in this twofold service, the saving of the regime in the civil war and the building of the army for the war to come, and Tukhachevsky stands as a deliverer in both registers, the general who had helped save the regime and the reformer who had built the army it would need.
3. The turn: the dictator’s fear and the fabricated conspiracy
The phenomenon’s third criterion, fear as the operative factor in the destruction, takes in the Tukhachevsky case the form of the dictator’s fear of an over-capable and popular soldier, the suspicion of a man whose ability, prestige, and standing in the army made him, in the dictator’s calculation, a potential threat to be eliminated, and the case shows the destruction proceeding from the fear of a ruler whose power was vast and whose suspicion was murderous, equipped with the machinery to act on that fear with a thoroughness no earlier regime could match.
The dictator Stalin, whose rule rested on the elimination of all potential rivals and threats, regarded the army and its leadership with the suspicion that a tyrant directs at any institution capable of organized force, and he regarded its most capable and most prominent figures with a particular dread, for they were the men who, if any could, might oppose him or supplant him (Conquest, 2008; Erickson, 2001). Tukhachevsky, as the foremost and most capable of the Soviet commanders, the architect of the army’s modernization, a hero of the civil war, and a figure of standing and prestige, was precisely the kind of man the dictator’s fear marked for elimination, his ability and his prominence making him, in the dictator’s calculation, a potential threat that must be removed before it could become an actual one. The fear was the familiar one of the suite, the dread of a ruler for an over-capable and popular soldier, intensified by the dictator’s general determination to eliminate all who might threaten his power and equipped with the machinery of the modern police state to act on that dread.
The destruction was accomplished through a fabricated conspiracy, the manufacture of a charge that Tukhachevsky and other senior officers had plotted treason, conspired with the foreign enemy, and planned a military coup, a charge constructed by the security apparatus through fabricated evidence and confessions extracted by torture (Conquest, 2008; Erickson, 2001). The historian must consider, as the method requires, whether the charge of conspiracy had any truth, whether Tukhachevsky and the officers destroyed with him had in fact plotted against the regime, and the judgment of history, confirmed by the subsequent rehabilitation of the victims and the exposure of the fabrication, is that the conspiracy was a fabrication, the charge manufactured by the security apparatus to justify the destruction the dictator’s fear had determined upon. The evidence was fabricated, the confessions were extracted by torture, and the conspiracy existed only in the constructions of the police apparatus that manufactured it, the charge serving, as in every case in the suite, the fear rather than the fact, the predetermined destruction given the color of a response to a treason that had never occurred. The operative cause of the destruction was the dictator’s fear of an over-capable and popular soldier; the charge of conspiracy was the instrument, the fabricated treason by which the destruction was accomplished and given the appearance of justice.
4. The destruction: the bloodstained confession, the secret trial, and the shot
The destruction itself was accomplished through arrest, torture, a secret trial, and execution, and the case displays the modern state’s machinery of destruction in its full development, the fabricated charge, the confession extracted by torture, the staged trial whose verdict was predetermined, and the execution that removed the deliverer, all carried out with a speed and a thoroughness that the modern police state made possible.
Tukhachevsky was arrested, and under interrogation he was tortured into a confession, the violence of the interrogation leaving its physical trace on the surviving record, for the confession document is reported to bear stains identified as the marshal’s own blood, the spattered marks of the violence by which the confession was extracted (Conquest, 2008). The bloodstained confession is the case’s defining physical evidence and the source of this paper’s title, the tangible proof of the torture and the fabrication, the document on which the marshal’s forced admission of a conspiracy that never existed is written in his own words and marked with his own blood, the physical trace of the violence that produced it. No other case in the suite preserves so tangible a proof of the fabrication, the very paper of the confession bearing the marks of the torture that extracted it, and the bloodstained confession stands as the modern case’s equivalent of the prosecutor’s confession in the Yue Fei case, the physical proof that the legal form was empty and the destruction accomplished by violence and fabrication.
Tukhachevsky was tried in secret, with the other senior officers charged with him, in a proceeding that was not a trial in any meaningful sense but the staging of a predetermined condemnation, the forms of a trial gone through to give the destruction the appearance of justice, and he was condemned and shot, executed along with the other officers in the first blow of a purge that would decapitate the Soviet officer corps (Conquest, 2008; Erickson, 2001). The execution of the marshal was followed by the destruction of the officer corps on a vast scale, for the fabricated conspiracy was made the pretext for a purge that swept through the army’s leadership, removing, imprisoning, and killing officers in numbers that gutted the command structure of the Red Army, the destruction of the deliverer becoming the occasion and the model for the destruction of the entire leadership of which he was the foremost (Conquest, 2008; Erickson, 2001). The modern case thus extends the destruction beyond the individual deliverer, as the Nguyễn Trãi case had extended it to the kindred, but here the extension is to the whole officer corps, the institution of which the deliverer was the leading figure, and the scale of the destruction, the gutting of the leadership of a great army, is the modern case’s distinctive enormity, the phenomenon’s destruction of the deliverer become, through the machinery of the modern state, the destruction of an entire military leadership.
5. The self-defeat: the gutted command and the catastrophe of 1941
The self-defeat that the suite finds in every case reaches in the Tukhachevsky case its most enormous scale, for the destruction of the marshal and the officer corps gutted the leadership of the army that would, within a few years, have to meet the German invasion, and the cost of that destruction was paid in the catastrophes of the war’s opening period, the disasters that the absence of the destroyed leadership made worse and that constitute the suite’s largest demonstration of the self-defeating character of the regime’s fear.
The purge that began with Tukhachevsky destroyed a vast proportion of the Soviet army’s senior leadership, removing the experienced and capable officers and replacing them, where they were replaced at all, with men less experienced, less capable, and cowed by the demonstration of what befell those who rose too high (Conquest, 2008; Erickson, 2001). When the German invasion came, the Red Army met it with a leadership that had been gutted of its ablest men, deprived of the experience and the capability that the purged officers had possessed, and burdened with the consequences of the doctrines and the modernization that the destruction of Tukhachevsky and his school had disrupted (Erickson, 2001). The catastrophes of the war’s opening period, the vast encirclements, the enormous losses of men and territory, the near-collapse of the Soviet defense, were made worse by the absence of the destroyed leadership, the army paying in the disasters of the invasion the cost of the purge that had removed its ablest commanders on the eve of the war.
The self-defeat is the suite’s largest in scale, for the cost of the destruction of the deliverer was not the loss of a city or a fleet but the crippling of the leadership of a great army at the moment of its greatest trial, paid in the losses of the war’s opening period, in armies destroyed and territories lost and deaths beyond counting. The regime’s fear of its ablest soldier, pressed through the machinery of the modern state into the destruction of the entire officer corps, produced the self-defeat that the suite finds in every case, the removal of the capability on which the regime’s survival depended, but on a scale that the modern state’s machinery made vast, the gutting of an army’s leadership on the eve of the war that army would have to fight. The dictator destroyed the marshal who had built the army and the officers who would have led it, and paid for the destruction in the catastrophes of the invasion, the self-defeat of the regime’s fear demonstrated on the largest scale the suite has examined.
6. The phenomenon analyzed: the four concepts in the modern case
The four analytical concepts of Paper 1 are present in the destruction of Tukhachevsky, and the case displays them in the particular register of the modern totalitarian state and the industrialized purge.
The convertibility of capability into threat appears in the dictator’s calculation that the most capable and prominent soldier was the most dangerous, that Tukhachevsky’s very ability and standing made him the man most to be feared, most capable of opposing or supplanting the dictator, and therefore most necessary to eliminate. The capability that had saved the regime and built the army was, in the dictator’s fear, the capability that could be turned against him, and the marshal’s prominence as the ablest of the commanders made him the foremost object of the fear, the convertibility operating in the tyrant’s calculation that the best soldier was the greatest threat. The modern case shows the convertibility pressed to its logical extreme by a dictator whose fear marked the most capable for destruction precisely because they were the most capable, the ability that the regime needed becoming the threat that the regime’s fear could not tolerate.
Prestige as a rival source of legitimacy appears in Tukhachevsky’s standing as a hero of the civil war and the foremost figure of the army, a prestige that made him, in the dictator’s fear, a potential rival, a man whose standing in the army and the regime might serve as the basis of an alternative authority. In a regime whose legitimacy rested on the dictator’s supremacy and that could tolerate no rival pole of standing, the prestige of the most prominent soldier was a threat to be removed, the marshal’s standing in the army a potential basis for opposition that the dictator’s fear could not permit to exist. The prestige of the deliverer was, as in every case, a rival source of standing that the regime could not coexist with, and its removal was part of the purpose of the destruction.
The asymmetry between the irreplaceable individual and the self-preserving institution appears in the modern case with a particular and terrible irony, for the institution, the regime, in acting to preserve itself against the imagined threat of its ablest soldier, destroyed the very capability on which its survival in the coming war would depend, and the asymmetry was resolved in favor of the regime’s fear at a cost that the regime would pay in the catastrophes of the invasion. The dictator, acting on the institution’s, and his own, overriding interest in the elimination of all potential threats, destroyed the deliverer and the officer corps, resolving the asymmetry by the removal of the capability that the regime’s survival required, and the cost of that resolution, paid in the disasters of the war’s opening period, is the suite’s largest demonstration of the self-defeating character of the institution’s fear. The modern case shows the asymmetry resolved with the machinery of the modern state, the destruction of the capability accomplished on a vast scale, and the cost paid on a vast scale, the institution’s self-preserving fear producing the near-destruction of the institution in the war it had crippled itself to meet.
The use of legal form to legitimate the destruction appears in the fabricated conspiracy, the secret trial, and the bloodstained confession, the modern state’s machinery of fabrication and staged justice deployed to give the destruction the appearance of a response to a real treason. The regime did not destroy the marshal openly as the elimination of a feared soldier; it manufactured a conspiracy, extracted confessions by torture, staged a trial, and pronounced a sentence, clothing the destruction in the forms of justice with a thoroughness that the modern state’s machinery made possible. The bloodstained confession is the proof of the fabrication, the physical trace of the torture that produced the forced admission of a treason that never existed, and it stands as the modern case’s exposure of the legal form’s emptiness, the equivalent of the prosecutor’s confession in the Yue Fei case, the tangible proof that the form was a covering for a destruction accomplished by violence and fabrication. The modern state’s machinery made the legal form more elaborate and more thorough than in any earlier case, the fabricated conspiracy and the staged trial and the extracted confession a system of fabrication that the older regimes could not approach, but the function was the same, to clothe the regime’s fear in the appearance of justice and to present the destruction of the deliverer as the punishment of a traitor.
7. The modern variant and the standard of the suite
Read against the cases that precede it, the Tukhachevsky case confirms the phenomenon’s structure and contributes the modern variant, the survival and intensification of the phenomenon in the modern totalitarian state, the destruction of the deliverer accomplished through the machinery of the modern police state and extended to the destruction of an entire officer corps. As in Saul’s pursuit of David, in Athens’s exile of Themistocles, in Rome’s persecution of Scipio, in the Chinese executions, in the late Roman murders, in Justinian’s suspicion of Belisarius, in the judicial murder of Yue Fei, in the abandonment of Joan of Arc, in the extermination of Nguyễn Trãi, and in the torture of Yi Sun-sin, a genuine deliverer is destroyed in consequence of the regime’s fear of the capability and prestige the deliverance created. The Tukhachevsky case is distinguished by its modern setting, by the machinery of the modern state that made the destruction more thorough and more lethal, by the extension of the destruction to the entire officer corps, and by the enormous scale of the self-defeat, the gutting of an army’s leadership on the eve of the largest war in history.
The modern case’s principal contribution to the suite is the demonstration that the phenomenon is not a relic of the older orders but a hazard that the modern state, far from outgrowing, equipped with deadlier instruments. The same fear that had thrown Saul’s spear and convened Yue Fei’s tribunal was, in the modern case, equipped with a secret police, a system of fabrication and torture, the apparatus of the show trial, and a totalitarian control of society, and these instruments made the destruction of the deliverer more thorough, more systematic, and more lethal than the older regimes could achieve, extending it from the individual to the entire officer corps and accomplishing it with a machinery of fabrication that the older orders could not approach. The phenomenon in the modern case is the phenomenon of all the earlier cases, the same fear, the same convertibility, the same prestige feared, the same legal form serving a predetermined end, but pressed through the machinery of the modern state into a destruction of unprecedented thoroughness and scale, and this demonstration, that the modern state intensified rather than outgrew the phenomenon, is the modern case’s distinctive and disturbing contribution to the suite.
The Tukhachevsky case gives the suite its largest demonstration of the self-defeat that the closing paper will argue, the cost of the destruction of the deliverer paid in the catastrophes of the war the regime had crippled itself to meet, and it shows the self-defeating character of the regime’s fear on a scale that the modern state’s machinery made vast. The dictator destroyed the marshal who had built the army and the officers who would have led it, and paid for the destruction in the disasters of the invasion, the regime’s fear of its ablest soldier producing the near-destruction of the regime in the war that soldier had built the army to fight. The bloodstained confession, the physical trace of the torture that produced the fabricated charge, stands as the modern case’s emblem, the tangible proof that the destruction of the deliverer was accomplished by violence and fabrication, the legal form an empty covering marked with the blood of the man it was used to destroy, and the verdict of history, which rehabilitated the marshal and exposed the fabrication, rendered against the regime the judgment that the suite finds in every case, the deliverer vindicated and the regime’s destruction of him condemned. The marshal who built the army was shot on a fabricated charge, and the army he built, gutted of its leadership by the purge his destruction began, paid for the regime’s fear in the catastrophes of the war, the self-defeat of the phenomenon demonstrated, in the modern case, on the largest and most terrible scale the suite has examined.
References
Butson, T. G. (1984). The Tsar’s lieutenant: The Soviet Marshal. Praeger.
Conquest, R. (2008). The great terror: A reassessment (40th anniversary ed.). Oxford University Press.
Erickson, J. (2001). The Soviet high command: A military-political history, 1918–1941 (3rd ed.). Frank Cass. (Original work published 1962)
