Mikhail Tukhachevsky – Russiapedia Military Prominent Russians

On June 12, 1937, Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Marshal of the Soviet Union, was executed. An excerpt from the article:

"Arrest
On May 22, 1937 Tukhachevsky was suddenly arrested by Stalin’s direct order without prosecutor’s sanction or court decision as it was commonly practiced. He and seven other top military commanders were accused of planning an anti-Bolshevik plot. While under arrest he pledged guilty and gave out names of other military commanders although we can assume the confessions were most probably obtained under torture or fabricated by secret police.
The eight of them were convicted of espionage and high treason and executed in June 1937. This trial opened the way to the notorious Great purge of the Red Army when hundreds of thousands of the military were executed or sent to prison camps without court verdicts.

Tukhachevsky’s wife was jailed and executed in 1941, his mother and sister died in prison. Three other sisters managed to survive the prison term, but their husbands were executed as well as Tukhachevsky’s two brothers. He was rehabilitated in 1957 when the sentence was reversed under Nikita Khrushchev, and was cleared judicially in 1988 in Gorbachev’s time.

Historians' opinions
There are three major versions of his unexpected fall. The first explains everything by Stalin’s paranoia which made him eliminate all possible rivals, and Tukhachevsky who was extremely popular and influential, was one of the first targets to be shot.

Another version says it was a provocation of the German secret police aiming to get rid of Soviet most talented commanders ahead of the war and therefore spreading rumors about an anti-government plot among the military.

The third view shared by many historians says that Tukhachevsky always reiterated that Germany is a major foe of the Soviet Union while Stalin aimed at reconciliation with the Reich which made the influential marshal and his supporters a serious obstacle on Stalin’s way.

The severe terror in the Soviet Union in the late 1930-s not only extremely weakened the Red Army but also made the Western democracies give up the idea of joining forces with the Soviet Russia against the Nazi Germany. The fallacious policy of making friends with Hitler taken by Stalin led to the most devastating war Russia ever waged in its history."