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The Red Army and the Great Terror - Stalin's Purge of the Soviet Military (Hardcover)
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The Red Army and the Great Terror - Stalin's Purge of the Soviet Military (Hardcover)
Series: Modern War Studies
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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.
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