Mikhail Tukhachevsky

Mikhail Tukhachevsky was the Red Army's most original strategist and the first man shot in the purge that destroyed its high command. He came from an impoverished noble family, was commissioned into the Semyonovsky Guards in 1914, was captured by the Germans in 1915 and escaped on his fifth attempt, sharing a cell at Ingolstadt with Charles de Gaulle. He joined the Bolsheviks in 1918 and commanded armies at twenty-five. He took Simbirsk and Omsk from Kolchak, crushed the Kronstadt rising across the ice in 1921 and the Tambov peasant revolt with hostage-taking and poison gas in the same year, and in 1920 drove the Poles back to the outskirts of Warsaw before being routed there - a defeat he blamed on Stalin, then political commissar of the South-Western Front, who never forgave the accusation. In the 1930s as head of armaments and then deputy commissar he built the theory of deep operations: mechanised forces striking simultaneously through the whole depth of an enemy's position rather than at its front, supported by airborne troops and aviation. He pushed tank and parachute development years ahead of anyone else. In May 1937 he was arrested, tortured - his confession survives with blood on it - convicted at a secret trial of conspiring with Germany, and shot the same night. Some 35,000 officers followed him. His doctrine was disowned and then relearned at enormous cost after 1941. He was rehabilitated in 1957. The Germans have often been credited with feeding the NKVD the forged evidence that condemned him, and the documents exist, but the current view is that Stalin had decided first and the forgery arrived to a case already made. His wife and both brothers were shot, and his daughter grew up in the camps.

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