Operation vesna and the growing espionage threat
Alongside continued observation of Trotskyists in the army the political police had initiated closer surveillance of military specialists in 1926. This was in response to the worsening international climate, particularly the perceived threat from Britain and the possibility of war. Fears of a conflict with Britain were rife in 1927 when a war scare swept through the Soviet Union. In August 1928 the political police received intelligence that the British planned to use the poor relations between the Soviet Union and Poland to provoke an uprising in Ukraine led by members of the then obsolete Ukrainian People’s Republic. The plan purportedly included using Red Army troops who had turned against the Bolsheviks. Yet, the operation was apparently postponed when Pilsudski fell ill in 1929 (Zdanovich 2008, pp. 385 – 86). Even though it is very difficult to authenticate this intelligence, the political police acted on it. Arrests were made in Ukraine, and the OGPU searched for hidden ‘double-dealers’ (dvurushniki) supposedly working for Polish intelligence. A number of the arrested were officers of the former Imperial Army, who, as Zdanovich notes, had links with retired or still serving Red Army officers. Surveillance of the Red Army was then set up under an operational name of ‘vesna’. The arrested former Imperial officers gave ‘evidence’ about an alleged counter-revolutionary organisation in the S. Kamenev Military School and within other civil education institutes (Zdanovich 2008, p. 387). Operation vesna expanded throughout 1930 with many arrests of military specialists in Moscow in August and spreading to Kiev and Leningrad. A large number of the arrests were confined to military specialists working in the academies, but some reached directly into the army itself.
In early 1930, Tukhachevskii, at the time the commander of the Leningrad Military District, came under close police scrutiny when two military specialists from the Frunze Military Academy, N. Kakurin and I. Troitskii, were arrested. During interrogation in August both implicated Tukhachevskii as supposedly being sympathetic to the Right Deviation and portrayed him as the head of a Right-led conspiracy (Artizov et al. 2003, p. 598). Stalin wrote to his ally Sergo Ordzhonikidze on 14 September about the case:
.. . This would mean that Tukhachevskii has been captured by anti-soviet elements from the ranks of the right. That is what the materials indicate. Is it possible? Of course, it is possible, it cannot be excluded. Evidently the Rights are preparing to install a military dictatorship, just to get rid of the Central Committee, the kolkhozy and sovkhozy, the Bolshevik tempos of development of industry.21
However, as he had done in 1927, Stalin hesitated again. He met with Ordzhonikidze and Voroshilov and conducted a face-to-face confrontation with Tukhachevskii, Kakurin and Troitskii. Stalin later wrote to Vyacheslav Molotov on 23 October, ‘With regard to the case of Tukhachevskii, he turned out to be 100% clean. This is very good’ (Kosheleva et al. 1995,p. 231). Stalin seemingly had been convinced of Tukhachevskii’s innocence.
In February of 1931 operation vesna reached it apogee and took on an all-Union level (Zdanovich 2008, p. 390). This meant that for the first time an extensive plot had been ‘exposed’ within the Red Army, with links to foreign governments and which supposedly aimed to overthrow the soviet regime. During the operation thousands of military specialists were discharged from the Red Army and its military academies on charges of being monarchist and White counter-revolutionaries, who conducted sabotage and espionage.22 This supposed ‘plot’ was on a much larger scale to the threats from Whites and foreign agents of the 1920s. However, the majority of the arrested were military specialists working in the academies, thus army outsiders. In addition, it is impossible to separate the Cultural Revolution of the late 1920s and early 1930s, a time when pre-revolutionary specialists faced harassment from younger revolutionary communists, from operation vesna. Class warfare and the previous trials of specialists working in industry (such as the Shakhty trial of 1928) form an important background to the persecution of military specialists in 1930.23 Despite this, however, vesna would not be forgotten. It was regarded as a large counter- revolutionary plot by the political police. Stalin was closely involved in investigating Tukhachevskii’s incrimination, and his comments about a ‘military dictatorship’ suggest that he perceived a credible threat. The case would thus have a sustained impact. Even though Stalin was convinced of Tukhachevskii’s innocence, and had showed the same hesitance to act as in 1927, suspicions around him and the wider army would linger and may never have been entirely dispelled.
The political police would certainly, at least by now, have a growing file on Tukhachevskii. Such files only ever grew thicker.
During the late 1920s many former Trotskyists in the army returned to the ranks after recanting their past opposition, but the perceived threat from Trotskyists remained a simmering issue in the military. Active Trotskyist ‘agitation’ was still a cause of arrest and discharge, but the political police also had lingering suspicions about those Trotskyists who had recanted their ‘political errors’.24 For example, in August 1933 they created a file on the former Trotskyist Primakov, at that time the deputy commander of the North-Caucasian Military District. The file noted that ‘[I]n June 1928 he gave a declaration about breaking with the opposition of a double-dealing (dvurushnicheskogo) character, having actually maintained his Trotskyist positions’ (Zdanovich 2008, p. 325).25 Following the assassination of the Leningrad Party boss Sergei Kirov in December 1934, which was initially blamed on Zinov’ev’s supporters, the former political opposition came under increasing pressure. The number of arrests increased dramatically (Khaustov & Samuelson 2009, p. 93). The army was not insulated from these political pressures and the military experienced an increase in arrests of former oppositionists and a nine-fold increase in ‘counter-revolutionary crime’ during 1934 – 1935.26 Furthermore, during 1935 the military procuracy highlighted the convictions of a number of Trotskyist ‘double-dealers’; those who had publicly recanted but who were apparently still active Trotskyists.27
Later in May 1935, alongside the party, the army conducted the Verification of Party Documents ( proverka). The proverka aimed to improve the chaotic state of party record keeping but also weed out inadequate party members and others deemed ‘enemies’. Overall, the army party organisations expelled 7,783 people during the proverka (approximately 9%). The most common reason for expulsion was hiding social origins.28 Trotskyism and Zinov’evism were lower down the list, totalling just 261 expulsions. For espionage the number was lower at 114.
On 26 June 1935 Yan Gamarnik, the head of PUR, gave a speech in the Belorussian Military District (BVO) and discussed the proverka. Gamarnik remarked that the proverka showed that people were still being studied ‘very badly’ in the army.29 Despite Trotskyists and spies being on the lower end of expulsions, Gamarnik highlighted them specifically:
Amongst those now exposed and excluded from the party are clear enemies—spies, white guards, Trotskyists, of whom we had not revealed before the proverka of party documents. ... The proverka of party documents helped us to identify the enormous quantity of people who we did not know earlier or knew poorly.30
In a speech in February 1936 Gamarnik discussed the proverka again, commenting: ‘ .. . we found
real enemies, who deceived us, who got into the army using false documents. We revealed spies in the army .. . much to our shame we are still allowing such scum into the army’.31
And on 1 April Gamarnik gave a similar speech to the Moscow Garrison, arguing that the army had ‘to close all gaps for the enemy .. . all the doors and windows were wide open and any clever person,
any clever crook, was able to infiltrate anywhere .. . ’.32 Thus, according to Gamarnik, self-policing in the military was inadequate and this gave the opportunity for dangerous ‘enemies’, such as foreign agents, to infiltrate into the ranks. However, crucially, at this stage Gamarnik remarked that the number of spies discovered in the army was ‘not large’.33
Gamarnik’s concerns that Trotskyists and foreign agents were easily able to infiltrate into the ranks were in line with those in the party and the political police. In September 1931 the Japanese invaded Manchuria, which raised the possibility that the Soviet Union would be forced to fight a war on two fronts. Hitler’s coming to power in January 1933 brought a formal end to the Treaty of Rapallo and Germany had now become a potential enemy. The spy threat to the Soviet Union was becoming a growing problem and a very large increase in the number of ‘exposed’ foreign agents was reported in 1933 in general terms, and this was also the case in the army.34 By the mid-1930s there were visible concerns from the political police about the danger from foreign agents. Nikolai Ezhov, who became head of the NKVD in September 1936, reported to Stalin in the summer of 1935 that foreign agents had infiltrated the Party. In February 1936 the Central Committee accepted Ezhov’s draft report ‘On Measures to Protect the USSR Against the Penetration of Spy, Terrorist, and Sabotage Elements’, which pointed to the growing spy threat within political e´migre´ circles in the Soviet Union (Jansen & Petrov 2002, pp. 41 – 42). As the international situation continued to deteriorate, these concerns about an espionage threat only increased (Getty & Naumov 2008, pp. 184 – 86; Chase 2002, p. 134).
At the same time as concerns were growing about foreign agents, rumours began to surface about the disloyalty of certain members of the military elite, in particular Tukhachevskii.
These rumours were reminiscent of those spread by the political police in the 1920s, but now the army elite were linked to Nazi Germany. For instance, in December 1935 the head of military intelligence, S. P. Uritskii, noted an alleged ‘secret connection’ between some German officers and the Red Army (Samuelson 2000, p. 210). Around the same time a Russian journal in Czechoslovakia,
Znamya Rossii, reported that an illegal underground organisation was operating in the Soviet Union which included members from the Red Army High Command (Lukes 1996, p. 507). A military intelligence report from 17 May 1936 detailed alleged comments from Hermann Go¨ ring saying that he had met with Tukhachevskii in Berlin and that the latter had raised the possibility of resuming the military collaboration between the two countries (Kantor 2009, p. 253). These rumours would only further reinforce already existing suspicions surrounding the Red Army and the military elite. However, for now, there was little indication of a danger of arrest. Tukhachevskii’s career continued to advance. He became a Marshal of the Soviet Union in 1935 and Voroshilov’s first deputy in April 1936. The careers of the others who would also be put on trial in June 1937, such as Uborevich and Eideman, also progressed. Indeed, Voroshilov lobbied Stalin for their promotions in 1936.35 Thus, rumours about the military elite persisted and they were surely kept under closer observation, but there was little danger of arrest at this time. However, increasing political tensions during 1936 brought a sequence of arrests within the party and military which would eventually endanger the entire Red Army.
Army subversion in the Civil War and the 1920s
Operation vesna and the growing espionage threat
Next;The arrest of the ‘Trotskyist Military Centre’
21 RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 778, l. 34.
22Estimates vary on the number of military specialists removed during the operation. Typically historians estimate approximately 3,000, however Tynchenko has argued a possible 10,000 (Tynchenko
2000, p. 3).
23For more on the Cultural Revolution see Fitzpatrick (1978).
24For Trotskyist cases, see RGVA, f. 9, op. 29, d. 16, l. 1; f. 37837, op. 10, d. 20, ll. 131– 32;
f. 37837,
op. 21, d. 52, ll. 46, 48; d. 39, l. 32.
25For OGPU suspicions of other former army Trotskyists, see Zdanovich (2008, p. 326).
26RGVA, f. 9, op. 29, d. 281, l. 144; f. 37837, op. 21, d. 107, ll. 14, 16.
27RGVA, f. 4, op. 14, d. 1684, ll. 33 – 36.
28RGVA, f. 33987, op. 3, d. 872, l. 85.
29RGVA, f. 9, op. 29, d. 15, l. 39.
30RGVA, f. 9, op. 29, d. 15, l. 39.
31RGVA, f. 9, op. 29, d. 263, l. 42.
32RGVA, f. 9, op. 29, d. 263, l. 83.
35RGVA, f. 4, op. 19, d. 18, ll. 176, 179.
33RGVA, f. 9, op. 29, d. 263, l. 81.
3 9, d. 178, ll. 2 – 4.
Vol. 67, No. 1, January 2015, 102–122
ISSN 0966-8136 print; ISSN 1465-3427 online/15/100102–21 q 2015 University of Glasgow
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