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Modern War Studies
The Red Army and the Great Terror

The Red Army and the Great Terror

Stalin's Purge of the Soviet Military

by Peter Whitewood

Series: Modern War Studies

Sales Date: August 3, 2015

368 Pages, 6.00 x 9.00 in

Hardcover
9780700621170
Published: August 2015

$54.99

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eBook
9780700621699
Published: September 2015

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Choice Outstanding Academic Title

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.

"No specialist on Stalin’s years in power can afford to miss this book."—Rezensionen
"Whitewood’s study give us the most suggestive solution that we have to date to the mystery of [Stalin’s] decimation of his military."—The Historian
"In addition to advancing a new interpretation of the military purge, the book serves as a valuable introduction to the dynamics of purge and terror beyond the armed forces. Anybody interested in Soviet civil-military relations between the Revolution and the Second World War will learn a great deal from reading this meticulously researched study."—Journal of Military History
"In his sweeping new history of the Red Army, Whitewood rejects the simplistic, but popular idea that Stalin purged the military in order to consolidate his own power. Rather, he sets the execution of Tukhachevskii, and other officers and the the purge of the army within a long and troubled relationship between the army and the state."—Russian Review
"Based on archival research and cogently argued, Whitewood makes a strong case for the military purge to be the genesis of the purge of wider Soviet society,"—Canadian Slavonic Papers
"This work is destined to become the most definitive source concerning the military purges for generations to come. Essential."—Choice
"An intriguing and well-argued case."—Journal of Slavic Military Studies
"Peter Whitewood’s well-researched book explores the origins of the suspicion that party officials had about career officers, the “military specialists” the Red Army had desperately needed in the wake of the October Revolution."—NYMAS Review
"Whitewood has a compelling and original thesis&#mdash;that Stalin’s purge of the military was not a well-planned, premeditated attack on an institution that he feared; rather he was finally convinced to do so after years of attacks on the political reliability of the army by the secret police, who saw spies and provocateurs everywhere within the ranks and command staff. This is completely original and challenges the conventional wisdom which largely has no good answer for why the purges occurred, but rests on the unsubstantiated premise that Stalin was simply consolidating power and rooting out possible sources of opposition."—Roger Reese, author of Red Commanders: A Social History of the Soviet Army Officer Corps, 1918–1991
"This is an excellent work of scholarship on the purges in Stalin’s military, one that the field has needed for quite some time. Indeed, there is no other extant book in English on the military purges. I am impressed by the breadth and force of Whitewood’s argument, so much so that I think there will be little point in other scholars going over the same ground again. In addition, Whitewood’s writing is clear and elegant; his source base is thorough; and his argument is important and convincing. Overall, it’s an impressive contribution."—David R. Stone, author of Hammer and Rifle: The Militarization of the Soviet Union, 1926–1933