Background

Ethnicity: Despite the fact, that Tukhachevsky was generally considered to be of Russian descent, many historians claimed that Mikhail was of Turkish and Flemish ancestry dating back to the Crusades. Some sources also claimed that he was of Polish extraction.

Mikhail Tukhachevsky was born on February 16, 1893, in Alexandrovskoye, Safonovsky District, Russian Empire (now Slednevo, Smolensk Oblast, Russia). He was the son of Nikolay Tukhachevsky and Mavra Tukhachevskaya. He belonged to a family of nobles, who were reportedly quite impoverished by the time he was born. Tukhachevsky also had two brothers, Nikolai and Alexandr, and three sisters.

Education

Mikhail Tukhachevsky studied at classical high school number 1 in Penza from 1904 to 1909. Later he attended the First Moscow Cadet Corpus. In 1912 he entered the Aleksandrovskoye military school where he studied until 1914.

Career

Mikhail Tukhachevsky started his career in 1914 when he joined the prestigious Semyonovsky Guard regiment and was sent to the battlefields of World War I. In February 1915, the German army captured him and imprisoned him at the secure and dangerous fortress of Ingolstadt in Bavaria. He tried to escape from prison four times but was successful only on the fifth attempt.

Tukhachevsky returned to Russia in 1917 at the time of the October Revolution. He joined the Bolsheviks' Red Army as an officer. From 1917 to 1918, he rose through the ranks of the Red Army as captain and then, commander. During the Russian Civil war, he served as commander of the 5th Army and fought against the White forces led by Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak and gained Siberia for Bolsheviks in 1919. In 1920, he secured another victory for the Red Army in Crimea. Tukhachevsky also was commander of the Western Front from April 29, 1920 to March 4, 1921 and fought in the Polish-Soviet War. Later, he was dispatched to handle an uprising against the Bolsheviks in Kronstadt. He also commanded the assault against the Tambov Republic between 1921 and 1922.

Tukhachevsky was appointed Chief of the Red Army Military Academy on July 25, 1921, and held this position until 1922. On January 24, 1922, he again was appointed as commander of the Western Front. He held this position until 1924. By 1924, he had reached the position of Deputy People's Commissar for Defence. In 1925, he was appointed Chief of the Staff of the Red Army, a position he held until 1928.

In 1928, Tukhachevsky started to write articles about combat strategies and tactics. He also served as commander of the Leningrad Military District from May 1928 to June 1931. By 1931, he had penned several books on military reforms and became in charge of military modernization. He organized the troops, equipped the army with the latest weapons, set up aviation, artillery, paratroop, tank, and other training academies, and supported military rocket studies.

In 1935, Mikhail Tukhachevsky became Marshal of the Soviet Union. By 1936, he was also appointed as the military commander of the Volga Military District. However, shortly after departing to take up his new command, he was secretly arrested on May 22, 1937 and brought back to Moscow. He was accused of plotting against the Party and forced to confess under torture. In June, he and eight others were charged with plotting with "foreign" elements during his European visit to overthrow the Communist government.

Achievements

• Mikhail Tukhachevsky was a Soviet military leader, author, and military theoretician who was known as one of the key leaders of the Red Army. He served as commander of the Western Front and also was chief of the Staff of the Red Army. Tukhachevsky theorized combat scenarios for future wars and created new means of employing forces. He also developed the tactical force employment concept of deep battle. For his success in military activities, Tukhachevsky achieved the rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union.
  
  Mikhail Tukhachevsky received several imperial awards like the Order of St. Anne, the Order of St. Stanislaus, and the Order of St. Vladimir. He also received the Order of Lenin on February 21, 1933. On August 7, 1919, Tukhachevsky was awarded the Order of the Red Banner.
  
  There are 72 streets in Russia and several in Belarus named after Tukhachevsky. He is the hero of many Russian novels and also appears in several Russian war films.

Religion

Tukhachevsky thought that the Slavs needed a new religion. He also was keen on the idea of neo-paganism. Nikolay Alexandrovich Tsurikov said that he saw a "scarecrow" in the corner of Tukhachevsky's cell in Ingolstadt fortress, and Tukhachevsky said that it was an effigy of Jarilo. However, some sources stated that Tukhachevsky was an atheist.

Tukhachevsky also drafted a project for the destruction of Christianity and the restoration of ancient paganism as a natural religion. His draft was put on the agenda and seriously discussed in Maly Sovnarkom. According to famous musicologist Leonid Sabaneyev, Tukhachevsky, together with his music teacher N. S. Zhilyaev, composed some sort of joke prayer as obligatory for the right-wing Bolsheviks to perform on a daily basis.

Politics

During the time that Mikhail Tukhachevsky spent in Ingolstadt fortress in Bavaria, he spouted nihilist beliefs and also highly praised Napoleon. According to Le Monde journalist Remy Roure, Tukhachevsky said that he would only follow Lenin if he "de-Europeanised and threw Russia into barbarism." However, later Tukhachevsky said that he was politically immature and greatly regretted his early views. In 1917, he joined the Communist Party.

Tukhachevsky was accused of planning an anti-Bolshevik plot in 1937. After his death, much of the information about him, including articles and photographs, was destroyed. However, Tukhachevsky was rehabilitated in 1957, when the sentence was reversed under Nikita Khrushchev, and was cleared judicially in 1988 in Gorbachev's time. After Tukhachevsky's rehabilitation, the Soviet media and official Soviet historical scholarship portrayed him as a Civil War hero and reformer of the Red Army.

Views

In his early years, Tukhachevsky often spoke against Jews, whom he called dogs who "spread their fleas throughout the world." He also said that he hated Jews for bringing Christianity and the "morality of capital" to Russia.

Quotations: "I am convinced that all that is needed in order to achieve what I want is bravery and self-confidence. I certainly have enough self-confidence. I told myself that I shall either be a general at thirty or that I shall not be alive by then."

"Many desire it. We are slack people but deeply destructive. Should there be a revolution, only God knows where it will end. I think that a constitutional regime would mean the end of Russia. We need a despot!"

"There can be no doubt that if we had been victorious on the Vistula, the revolutionary fires would have reached the entire continent."

Personality

Mikhail Tukhachevsky was fluent in French and German, loved playing the violin, admired Beethoven's music. He also was a political patron and close friend of composer Dmitri Shostakovich.

However, those who knew Tukhachevsky said that he was ruthless as any Bolshevik. During the Kronstadt rebellion, he used choking gas and poison shells. Tukhachevsky violently crushed a major uprising in Russia's central Tambov and Voronezh regions with such methods as a mass shooting, execution of hostages, and destroying villages.

Quotes from others about the person

• Roman Gul: "A music lover, aesthete, fan of Beethoven. The 27-year-old commander is renowned, apart from his victories, for his ability to organize his army's work."
  
  J. Kantor: "Ambition is one of the main traits of the still young Misha Tukhachevsky, which can be traced back to his studies in grammar school and later in high school."

Interests

• Playing the violin

• Music & Bands

  Ludwig van Beethoven

Connections

Mikhail Tukhachevsky's first wife was Maria Tukhachevskaya. They got to know each other before the First World War. She committed suicide in 1920 by shooting herself in her husband's carriage. Later Tukhachevsky married Amalia Yakovlevna Protas. The marriage produced a daughter, but she died of diphtheria in infancy. Amalia and Mikhail soon divorced after that.

Mikhail Tukhachevsky married Nina Tukhachevskaya in 1921. The marriage produced a daughter. Tukhachevsky also had an affair with a coworker's wife, Julia Ivanovna Kuzmina, with whom he had a daughter.

After Mikhail Tukhachevsky was executed on charges of treason, his family, including his wife and brothers, were also executed. His sisters and daughter were sent to labor camps called 'Gulag.'

Father:

Nikolay Tukhachevsky

(1866 – 1914)

Mother:

Mavra Tukhachevskaya

(1869 – 1941)

Brother:

Alexander Tukhachevsky

(September 1, 1895 – December 15, 1937)

Brother:

Nikolay Tukhachevsky

(1889 – December 25, 1937)

Sister:

Olga Geiman-Tukhachevskaya

(1903 – 1995)

Sister:

Sofya Tukhachevskaya

(1903 – 1939)

Sister:

Maria Tukhachevskaya

(1907 – 1995)

Sister:

Elizaveta Arvatova-Tukhachevskaya

(1907 – 1997)

Sister:

Natalya Rostova

late wife:

Maria Tukhachevskaya

(died 1920)

ex-wife:

Amalia Yakovlevna Protas

Wife:

Nina Tukhachevskaya

(1900 – 1941)

Daughter:

Svetlana Tukhachevskaya

(September 15, 1922 – November 2, 1982)

Daughter:

Svetlana Nikolaevna Kuzmina

Partner:

Julia Ivanovna Kuzmina

colleague:

Semyon Budyonny

colleague:

Joseph Stalin

References

• The Tukhachevsky Affair A book by Victor Alexandrov.
  1963
• Plans for Stalin's War-Machine: Tukhachevskii and Military-Economic Planning, 1925-1941 In the interwar period, Red Army commanders headed by Tukhachevskii developed a new doctrine of mobile warfare and 'deep operations'. The military requirements of armaments and industrial production in the event of war was a central parameter in Stalinist industrialization. Based on recently opened Russian archives, the book analyzes military dimensions of Soviet long-term economic and military reconstruction plans from the mid-1920s until 1941. It presents a new framework for estimating the Soviet war-economic preparations, drastically underestimated by contemporaries.
  1999
• Forging Stalin's Army: Marshal Tukhachevsky and the Politics of Military Innovation This innovative study examines the early years of the Red Army as it developed from a revolutionary partisan force into a modern, professional institution under the leadership of Mikhail Tukhachevsky, an important and controversial figure in the politics of the Stalin period.
  1998
• Tsar's Lieutenant: The Soviet Marshal A book by Thomas G. Butson.
  1984