The arrest of the ‘Trotskyist Military Centre’
In January 1936 one of Trotsky’s associates, Valentin Ol’berg, who had arrived in Russia from Germany, was arrested. Ol’berg’s arrest led to a series of arrests and the ‘exposure’ of an alleged major counter-revolutionary group. The investigation into the Kirov assassination was later reopened. This time the former oppositionists Zinov’ev and Kamenev were forced to give confessions of their supposed terrorist activity, of murdering Kirov and to describe their plans to assassinate other party leaders (Getty & Naumov 1999, pp. 247 – 60). Zinov’ev, Kamenev and another 14 defendants were subsequently put on trial in August and all were executed. Importantly, the trial raised alleged links between the defendants and the Nazis. As Germany was now the most dangerous international threat, this raised the seriousness of the ‘exposed’ counter-revolutionary group. Old accusations of being an oppositionist now had a new and more dangerous implication of working with a hostile fascist enemy.
This move against former oppositionists affected the Red Army directly. From the Ol’berg arrest there were numerous connections to former military Trotskyists and several were arrested, for either belonging directly to the Zinov’ev– Kamenev group or for membership of a separate ‘Trotskyist Military Centre’. In the summer and autumn former army Trotskyists, including Mrachkovskii, Putna and Primakov, were arrested. The‘exposure’ of ties between the defendants at the August trial and serving men in the Red Army was far more serious than the earlier arrests for Trotskyism in the army.
Now a group of officers were supposedly complicit in a plot to assassinate leading party figures. The existence of a ‘Trotskyist Military Centre’ gave form to what had previously been a relatively disparate string of arrests for Trotskyism in the military. In addition, the idea of a military plot was also beginning to take shape. One of the defendants of the August show trial, Isak Reingol’d, a former Trotskyist and Chairman of the Cotton Syndicate, had given ‘evidence’ that power could be seized by the counter-revolutionaries through a ‘military plot’ (voennyi zagovor).36 From the investigation into the ‘Zinov’ev– Kamenev Counter- revolutionary Bloc’, a number of former Trotskyists who had recanted years before and had been working in party positions were now arrested. These included Karl Radek and Grigorii Sokol’nikov, a senior journalist and first deputy people’s commissar for light industry, respectively. With further arrests of other senior former Trotskyists, such as the deputy people’s commissar for heavy industry, Georgy Pyatakov, the foundations were laid for the second show trial in January 1937.
The ‘evidence’ extracted from these men continued to incriminate other army officers. In December
Radek testified to the existence of a military plot, which included some of the already arrested Trotskyists in the army. Sokol’nikov, who was arrested a month before the August show trial, gave evidence in December about supposed preparations for treachery by the Trotskyist officers during the outbreak of war (Khaustov & Samuelson 2009, p. 108). In addition, there was a call from within the Red Army elite to root out the Trotskyist ‘conspirators’. On 22 August Semen Budennyi sent a letter to Voroshilov with his impressions of the August show trial and called for a thorough investigation into the Red Army. Budennyi singled out the command in particular and argued that the officers were susceptible to counter-revolutionary influence. Budennyi’s intervention is important. He was Voroshilov’s close ally and Stalin’s old comrade from the Civil War and his voice would carry weight. (Budennyi was one of the very few senior officers unaffected by the military purge.) Indeed, Budennyi was probably trying to influence Stalin or make a clear signal that he saw a threat within the military. Budennyi’s letter was later forwarded to Stalin, Ezhov and A. A. Andreev on 1 September.37
The political police also matched Budennyi’s call and declared that the Red Army should be searched more thoroughly. As the new head of the NKVD, Ezhov signalled his intentions early on. Just prior
to his appointment in September Ezhov sent a letter to Stalin discussing the August trial and mentioned that there must still be Trotskyist officers unexposed within the Red Army (Jansen & Petrov 2002, p. 49). Thus, with Ezhov at the helm of the NKVD and Budennyi calling for an investigation into the officer corps, two powerful influences coincided to expand the investigation of the ‘Trotskyist Military Centre’ deeper into the Red Army. Indeed, at an NKVD conference later in December Ezhov again reiterated the dangers of hidden enemies within the Red Army, arguing that they had more opportunities to cause harm in the military than in industry (Jansen & Petrov 2002, p. 69).
The political clampdown on former Trotskyists in the party and the expanding counter- revolutionary conspiracy produced an increase in the number of arrested former Trotskyists in the army. Between 1 August and 31 December 1936 there were 212 arrests for ‘counter-revolutionary Trotskyism’ in the military, of which 32 were from the officer corps. The number of such arrests from January to 1 August 1936 was 125 with six from the officer corps. From 1 January 1937 to 1 March 1937 the pace of arrests seen in the latter half of 1936 was maintained with 125 further arrests made with 43 from the officer corps.38 This was not a dramatic increase in number, but it does show that as the political repression gathered pace within the party, it was impossible to ignore the Trotskyist ‘enemies’ in the army. However, importantly, these arrests had not fully broken into the wider ranks in the latter half of 1936.
Many of the arrested were from the military academies. In addition, former Trotskyists, such as Primakov and Putna, were too much in the minority and not from the upper ranks to cause a real crisis. The military elite were for now unaffected by the expanding political arrests. It seems that neither Budennyi’s letter nor Ezhov’s call to investigate the military had led to Stalin taking a firmer line. As the arrests were only few in number and did not touch the upper ranks, Stalin perhaps was not very alarmed just yet. The Red Army was far from being destabilised.
It is likely that Stalin sanctioned Ezhov to carry out a deeper investigation of the army, to explore the extent of the perceived Trotskyist infiltration, but he would wait and see what ‘evidence’ was found. Yet, importantly, even though the rumours suggesting disloyalty within the military elite had not subsided, the charges would need to move on from ‘Trotskyist counter-revolution’ in order to affect the upper ranks. There would need to be a new and more widely applicable conspiracy to create a more serious crisis in the Red Army and compel Stalin to take firmer action. This new conspiracy began to emerge during the last few months of 1936 as the charge of Trotskyism began to align with the charge of foreign espionage. It was this that provided the opportunity for the perception of a serious military plot to develop, and at the very last moment, providethe momentum to affect a much wider circle of officers.
36RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 93, l. 43.37RGVA, f. 4, op. 19, d. 16, ll. 262, 265.
EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES
Vol. 67, No. 1, January 2015, 102–122
ISSN 0966-8136 print; ISSN 1465-3427 online/15/100102–21 q 2015 University of Glasgow
Papers published under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY)
http://www.tandfonline.com/terms-and-conditions
.jpg)
