Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevsky (16 February 1893-12 June 1937) was a Marshal of the Soviet Union who served as Chief-of-Staff of the Red Army from 1925 to 1928. He was responsible for defeating the White Army in Siberia during the Russian Civil War and was a war hero, but Joseph Stalin had him executed in 1937 during the Great Purge.
Biography[]
Mikhail Tukhachevsky was born on 16 February 1893 in Alexandrovskoye, Russian Empire (present-day Safonovsky District, Smolensk Oblast, Russia) to a family of hereditary nobles. Tukhachevsky joined the Semyonovsky Regiment during World War I, and he escaped from the Imperial German Army four times before being imprisoned in Ingolstadt with Charles de Gaulle. Tukhachevsky spouted his anti-Semitic views to De Gaulle, and in October 1917 he joined the Bolsheviks despite his noble birth after being freed from prison. He was given command of the Soviet 5th Army in 1919 and used attacks to exploit the White Army's flanks and encircled the Whites, and Alexander Kolchak's army in Siberia was defeated by the Red Army. In 1920, he moved to the Kuban and defeated the Whites there, also defeating Pyotr Wrangel's army in the Crimea and the Tambov Republic in 1921-1922. He was as ruthless as many other Bolshevik generals, using poison gas and executing hostages to put down peasant uprisings. In 1920, however, he was defeated in the Polish-Soviet War at the Battle of Warsaw, causing for him to argue with Stalin. In the Interwar Years, he masterminded the idea of "deep operations" and the use of armored units in war, which helped in the reform of the Red Army. However, he was arrested and charged with treason during Joseph Stalin's Great Purge in the 1930s due to his large amount of influence and power. On 12 June 1937, Tukhachevsky was executed by NKVD captain Vasily Blokhin.