Soviet Marshals From Trotsky to Zhukov

...Only with the gradual appearance of a new mass army after 1934, and the accompanying formation of a self-contained officers' corps, did the Army become a potential threat to the regime--especially as the Soviet supreme command was headed by so able and ambitious a personality as Marshal Tukhachevsky...

...When the purges hit the Red Army in May 1937, it contained a total of 80.000 officers...

...The postwar creation of guards units, increasingly privileged status of the officers' corps, and return to pre-Revolutionary forms and traditions signalized the political importance which the Army's military victories had brought it...

...The Red Army's tremendous rise in prestige as a result of the war seemed to pose a threat to the dominant position of the Communist party and the secret police...

...A quarter were veterans of the Civil War, and of these a quarter were probably former Tsarist officers...

...Boris Meissner is a veteran student of Soviet affairs...

...It seems to lean rather toward Bulganin, as indicated by an article in the February 23 Tagliche Rundschau which ignored Khrushchev but quoted Bulganin several times...

...This group from the Soviet Military Administration in Germany is apparently somewhat opposed to Khrushchev, who is more closely allied with the generals who fought under Marshal Konev on the southern front...

...At all events, there are still powerful factors operating to limit the political influence of the armed forces...

...This is exercised, first of all, by the Party organization within the Army, which is directly subordinate to Party chief Khrushchev...

...SOVIET MARSHALS From Trotsky To Zhukov By Boris Meissner The formation of an armed people's militia in place of a standing army was one of Lenin's chief aims when the Bolsheviks took power in 1917...

...At the same time, considerable younger blood was injected into the top officers' cadres...

...It is clear that the Soviet marshals are no more a "monolithic' group than is the Presidium of the Communist party...

...Soviet officers and enlisted men spend their lives in two completely separate worlds...

...On the other hand, it is a mistake to underestimate the degree of their cohesiveness...

...So long as the Soviet officers' corps is not a closed, self-perpetuating body, it is wrong to speak of it as a military caste...

...In the vast spaces of Russia, this force was numerically too weak to play a decisive role in the game of power politics...

...The heavy wounds thus inflicted could be only partially healed by the organizational measures taken by Marshal Voroshilov in 1939, and the Red Army's defeats in the Finnish winter campaign of 1939-40 made basic reforms necessary...

...and, secondly, by the counter-intelligence organization operating in the Army, which is responsible to the State Security Committee of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, and thus ultimately to Premier Bulganin...

...Timoshenko emerged on the scene again in 1948 and Zhukov three years later...

...Tukhachevsky, a former Tsarist officer, had in the past been closely allied with Trotsky, the founder of the Red Army...

...In the past decade, the top Soviet military leadership has shown remarkable continuity and stability as compared with the constant changes in the Government and Party bureaucracy...

...A similar article in the February 3 issue of Krasnaya Zvezda, organ of the Soviet Army, also made no mention of Khrushchev...

...And, in an earlier Pravda article on February 3. Lieutenant-General of the Guard Radimtsev played up Khrushchev's connection with the crucial victory at Stalingrad...

...Only if a situation arose which seemed to threaten the Army s present semi-autonomous position would its leaders take a direct hand in the political struggle in the Soviet Union...

...The unquestioned command authority of Army officers was restored and was strengthened by the introduction of a severe disciplinary code...

...The rank of general was created only in May 1940, when (in addition to the five existing marshals) more than 900 generals were appointed...

...After Stalin's death in 1953, the Soviet marshals were quick to consolidate their power in domestic affairs...

...It is difficult to foresee how matters will develop in the future...

...Since Malen-kov's removal as Premier, the three top Government posts (apart from the secret police) have been occupied by marshals: Voroshilov is President, Bulganin Premier, and Zhukov Defense Minister...

...The Civil War forced the adoption of conscription and the creation of a mass army of over 5 million, but the reforms carried out by War Commissar Frunze in 1924 fixed the peacetime strength of the standing army at 562,000 men...

...They will also strive to hold the power of the secret police in check...

...What the Red Army lost through these reforms in revolutionary spirit, it gained in discipline, competence and flexibility...

...The marshals can be counted on to make every effort to block the concentration of total power in one individual or group of individuals...

...The fact that the marshals and generals belong more or less to the same generation has tended to weld them together and give them added strength as a political force...

...Among the higher-ranking officers and particularly the generals, however, the restrictions on promotion have, in the past few years, given rise to certain evidences of caste formation...

...An extensive reshuffling of the Army High Command in 1946, which temporarily eclipsed Marshals Zhukov and Timoshenko, once more gave Stalin absolute control of the Red Army, which was now called the Soviet Army and was reorganized on a peacetime basis...

...Bulganin and Khrushchev were leading politruks during the war...

...However, despite the marshals' evident support for the present regime, there are certain signs of factionalism within their ranks...

...The reforms of the years 1934 to 1936, which led to the introduction of officers' ranks and the revival of the general staff, were due mainly to Tukhachevsky...

...Timoshenko and Vasilievsky...

...In his view, any army--a tightly organized institution with a closed body of men at the top--threatened to become an autonomous instrument of power capable of imposing the will of a small group on the people...

...When the Red Army of Workers and Peasants was officially founded on February 23, 1918, it was at first merely a volunteer army of not quite 100,000 men...

...and one notes the absence of the balance-wheel provided by men of the early-middle-age group in the Party and Government...

...At present, there clearly exists a balance of power between the Communist party and the Soviet armed forces...

...The author of this article was Marshal Chuikov, former chief of the Occupation forces in Germany, who now serves under his predecessors, Defense Minister Zhukov and General Staff Chief Sokolovsky, as commander of the important Kiev military district...

...It is conservatively estimated that some 20,000 officers were arrested in 1937-1938...

...And Bulganin, even more than President Voroshilov, is a Party marshal rather than a professional officer...

...This military intelligentsia constitutes a largely autonomous group in the Soviet Union today, and it forms a powerful counterweight to the Party and Government bureaucracy...

...Fear of the power of the military leadership led Stalin to extend the purges of the late 1930s to the Red Army officers' corps...

...Moreover, the pay differential is greater than in perhaps any other army...

...This has caused considerable social tension, particularly because the Soviet Army is almost wholly lacking in the semi-patriarchal relationship which in the old Tsarist army did so much to minimize differences in rank and social position...

...While the Soviets initially rejected the idea of an army of professional soldiers, they did not wholly reject the professional officer...

...The contrast between the top Army leaders, most of whom belong to the older generation, and the rest of the officers' corps, in which younger men predominate, is a glaring one...

...The fall of MVD chief Beria greatly weakened the Army's most formidable rival...

...The military specialists inherited from the Tsarist army, who were mostly members of the old intelligentsia, were less affected by the purges than the so-called "Red officers," who came chiefly from the peasantry and working class...

...The rise of a tightly integrated officers' corps, belonging socially to the top group of Soviet functionaries, has led to an increasing gulf between officers and men...

...This led the Soviet chieftains to take a number of measures aimed at neutralizing its power...

...During the struggle between Malenkov and Khrushchev, there was a noticeable effort to exalt the role of the politruks in World War II...

...At the same time, this closed character of the Army high command may ultimately prove a source of weakness...

...65 per cent of them holding the rank of colonel or higher...

...This article is adapted from a longer manuscript published in the journal Ost-Europa...

...1945 made a special grant of land on which to build a home to all generals and especially meritorious high-ranking officers...

...Even more important, however, is the twofold grip which the Party maintains on the Army...

...The fate of Tukhachevsky was a warning that the surviving Soviet military leaders of his generation can hardly have forgotten...

...One immediate consequence of the purges was that the proletarian and peasant element in the officers' corps was decimated and the gaps filled by young military specialists from the new intelligentsia...

...There is a special officers' store, a special officers' mess which serves more and better food, a special officers' club, etc...

...This number was considerably increased during the war, and, under a law of July 24...

...Indeed, it was in the military sphere that the dilettantism so characteristic of the early Soviet period was first eliminated and replaced by the principle of specialization...

...It is the old Civil War generation that produced the two men now sitting on lop of the political heap, as well as such representatives of the military as Marshals Zhukov...

...The decision of the Soviet marshals to throw their weight against Malenkov and for Bulganin and Khrushchev was largely a question of generations, though the marshals have always instinctively preferred those who served as politruks (political commissars) at the front to the Party bosses behind the lines...

...military history shows many examples of victorious commanders who rested on their laurels and proved unequal to new challenges...

...Without those qualities, it could hardly have withstood the test of World War II...

...MVD shock troops (police commandos housed in barracks) were built up as a counterweight to the Army, and, in the summer of 1945, the leaders of the secret police were given ranks corresponding to those in the top Army echelons...

...A decree of the Council of People's Commissars on June 21...

...One of these is the interservice conflicts and personal rivalries within the armed forces...

...1943, sharp distinctions between generals and lower-ranking officers were introduced...

...They unquestionably recognize the dominant position of the Communist party in the Soviet state, but they are intent upon maintaining some balance of power between the Party and Government...

...Several high Party and police functionaries were given general's rank, with Stalin becoming Generalissimo of the armed forces and Beria (as head of the MVD) and Bulganin (as Defense Minister) Marshals of the Soviet Union...

...The Radimtsev article was reprinted on February 22 in the Tagliche Rundschau, organ of the Soviet Occupation forces in Germany: but, significantly, the paragraph on Khrushchev was omitted...

...This situation lasted until 1948, when the Berlin Blockade resulted in increased armaments and an automatic rise in the power of the Army...

...On February 23 of this year, in a Pravda article marking the thirty-seventh anniversary of the Soviet Army, Marshal Konev stressed the decisive part played by the politruks in winning the war...