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WORK TITLE: The Red Army and the Great Terror
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: York, England
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
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https://www.yorksj.ac.uk/schools/humanities-religion–philosophy/staff-profiles/history-american-studies-and-war-studies/peter-whitewood/dr-peter-whitewood.html * https://kansaspress.ku.edu/subjects/history-russian-and-soviet/978-0-7006-2117-0.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.:
n 2015038400
LCCN Permalink:
https://lccn.loc.gov/n2015038400
HEADING:
Whitewood, Peter
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1_ |a Whitewood, Peter
670
__ |a The Red Army and the Great Terror, 2015: |b ECIP t.p. (Peter Whitewood)
670
__ |a University of Leeds website, June 18, 2015 |b (Peter Whitewood; PhD student and postgraduate tutor, Univ. of Leeds; researches the Red Army and the terror; B.A. degree in History at Newcastle Univ.; M.A. degree in Modern History, Univ. of Leeds)
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:Newcastle University, B.A.; University of Leeds, M.A., Ph.D. candidate.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Historian and professor. York St. John University, York, England, lecturer in history and American studies.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to academic journals, including Slavonic and East European Review, Europe-Asia Studies, and Journal of Slavic Military Studies.
SIDELIGHTS
Historian and professor Peter Whitewood is lecturer in history and American studies, at York St. John University in England. He studies the political and diplomatic history of the early Soviet state and Stalin period, and writes about how the Soviet-Polish War was understood and articulated by the Soviet elite in the 1920s. For academic publications, he has written about Stalin’s purge of the military and subversion in the Red Army for such publications as Slavonic and East European Review, Europe-Asia Studies, and Journal of Slavic Military Studies. He was also involved in a collaborative project on transnational volunteer soldiers. Whitewood holds a bachelor’s degree in history from Newcastle University and a master’s degree in modern history from the University of Leeds, where he is also a Ph.D. candidate.
In 2016, Whitewood published The Red Army and the Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Soviet Military. On June 11, 1937, a military court ordered the execution of several experienced army officers, including Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevskii, for the crime of participating in a Nazi plot to overthrow Stalin. Consequently, Stalin ordered a massive military purge from rank and file soldiers up through the officer corps that resulted in the discharge and arrest of tens of thousands of officers and soldiers. Whitewood argues that the purge resulted from Stalin’s panic, weakness, and misperception rather than a desire to consolidate power. The purge allowed the escalation of the Great Terror surge of political repression in the late 1930s and imprisonment of more than one million Soviet citizens, execution of over 750,000 people, and eventual dismal performance of the army against the June 1941 German invasion.
Whitewood bases his thesis on Soviet civil-military relations beginning with the 1917 Soviet revolution. Paranoid accusations of his secret police, a view that spies and Tsar supporters were everywhere, and an infiltration of foreign intelligence agencies in the Red Army all propelled Stalin to instigate the purge. Whitewood researched newly opened Russian archives and recent Russian language publications to examine the state of violence, power, and civil-military relations under Stalin’s regime. Writing on the Strategy Page website, Robert L. Miller commented that Whitewood’s “style is marred by frequent repetition and a dry absence of anecdotes,” and that he “dismisses as unreliable the accounts of dissidents and defectors,” such as the testimony of Walter G. Krivitsky to the U.S. Congress in 1939, and that he omitted the memoir of French counterintelligence officer Col. Paul Paillole. Nevertheless, Miller said: “Whitewood sheds light on some of the mystery, but the deeper secrets of 1937 still elude us.”
BIOCRIT
ONLINE
Leeds University Website, http://www.leeds.ac.uk (June 1, 2017), author profile.
Strategy Page, https://www.strategypage.com (June 19, 2017), Robert L. Miller, review of The Red Army and the Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Soviet Military.
York St John University Website, https://www.yorksj.ac.uk/ (June 1, 2017), author profile.*
Dr Peter Whitewood
Lecturer: History
E: p.whitewood@yorksj.ac.uk
T: +44 (0)1904 876198
A picture of Peter Whitewood
Peter completed his PhD at the University of Leeds in 2013 and joined York St John soon after. His research interests focus on the political and diplomatic history of the early Soviet state and Stalin period. His first book, The Red Army and the Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Soviet Military, provided an entirely new explanation for Stalin’s purge of the Red Army in 1937-1938. Taking a broader view of Soviet civil-military relations from 1917, his research argued that this purge was launched from a position of panic and weakness, rather than being simply an expression of Stalin’s desire to consolidate power. The book argues that without the military purge, there would have been no escalation of the Great Terror in 1937.
He was also recently involved in a collaborative project on transnational volunteer soldiers, focused on the host countries. He wrote about the Soviet case: foreign soldiers in the Red Army in the Russian Civil War.
Peter's next project will explore how the Soviet-Polish War was understood and articulated by the Soviet elite and what impact this had on the evolution of the Soviet state in the 1920s. Rather than analyse the Soviet-Polish War just as a military campaign, the project will focus on how the aftershocks of war contributed to the emergence of the Stalinist system and the transformation of the Revolution.
Publications and Postgraduate Supervision
Publications
Postgraduate Supervision
The Red Army and the Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Soviet Military (University Press of Kansas, September 2015)
‘Stalin’s Purge of the Military and the Soviet Mass Operations’, Slavonic and East European Review, 93. 2 (2015)
‘Subversion in the Red Army and the Military Purge of 1937-1938’, Europe-Asia Studies, 67. 1 (2015)
‘Towards a New History of the Purge of the Military, 1937–1938’, Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 24. 4 (2011)
I regularly write book reviews for several journals, including Europe-Asia Studies, Slavonic and East European Review, European History Quarterly, and Revolutionary Russia.
The Red Army and the Great Terror
Stalin's Purge of the Soviet Military
Peter Whitewood
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.
“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
See all reviews...
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.
About the Author
Peter Whitewood is Lecturer in History and American Studies, at York St. John University in the United Kingdom.
===
Peter Whitewood
Rethinking Stalin’s Purge of the Red Army, 1937-38
Posted on June 13, 2016 by Suzanne Galle
9780700621170On 11 June 1937, a Soviet military court sentenced a group of some of the most senior officers in the Red Army to execution. Accused of working for Nazi Germany and coordinating a so-called ‘military-fascist plot’, the group were charged with sabotage, espionage, and planning to overthrow the Stalinist regime. The sentences – carried out just hours later – marked the point when Stalin’s military purge burst into the open and sparked nothing short of international scandal. Iosif Stalin was decapitating his military at the very moment that Europe was bracing itself for total war. Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevskii, the Red Army’s most creative thinker and strategist, was the most prominent victim of the military purge in 1937, but the net was cast much wider. Over the next two years over 30,000 army leaders were discharged from the ranks; thousands were arrested and executions were widespread. The violence began to subside in late 1938 and reinstatements to the ranks became more common in 1939, but the military purge remained a highly destabilizing and damaging attack on the Red Army. It was a central moment in the broader Great Terror that gripped the Soviet Union in the mid-to-late 1930s. Moreover, the purge was a key moment in the years leading up the outbreak of the Second World War. Stalin’s attack on his army in 1937 made him seem unpredictable and unreliable; an alliance with the British and French governments against Nazi Germany was now increasingly unlikely.
There was of course no truth in the charges against the Tukhachevskii group: there was no ‘military-fascist plot’ or genuine conspiracy in the Red Army. Confessions were coerced from the arrested men, often using violence. However, why Stalin lashed out at his army at the same time that the Soviet Union was gearing up for war, as military spending was rising at break-neck pace, has long been without an adequate explanation The most common argument (dominant from the Cold War) points to Stalin’s desire for total power. In short, ambitious and popular officers like Tukhachevskii had to be killed for Stalin to rest easy about the security of his dictatorship. But this does not explain why the military purge spread so quickly beyond Tukhachevskii and the group of officers put on trial in June. Why were tens of thousands of army leaders subsequently drawn into a mass purge? If Stalin was primarily concerned about preserving his position as dictator, smashing the Red Army in such a dramatic (and ultimately uncontrollable) fashion was a very risky way of consolidating power, especially when world war was on the horizon. Launching the military purge was a big risk and one that put the security of the Soviet Union under threat. If anything, the purge put Stalin’s own position in danger.
A second – and related – explanation for the military purge points to Stalin’s paranoia: Stalin saw ‘enemies’ everywhere and the Red Army was no exception. In this way, the military purge was not a targeted removal of potential challengers to Stalin’s power, but instead a manifestation of the dictator’s worldview and his tendency to lash out at imaginary ‘enemies’. However, it is impossible to know if Stalin did genuinely suffer from paranoia, and even so, this is too much of a blanket explanation for Stalinist political violence. It leaves unanswered why the Stalinist regime deployed violence when it did; why this violence took on different forms (targeted arrests or collective punishment); it says nothing about the thousands of other perpetrators, collaborators and other unwilling participants working for the Stalinist regime. And even if we accept that Stalin was paranoid – or at the very least highly suspicious – we need to understand where his suspicions about the Red Army stemmed from specifically. How and why did Stalin come to believe that dangerous ‘enemies’ were at the heart of the Red Army establishment in 1937?
Mikhail Mikhail Tukhachevskii
The key to understanding the military purge is to look back to the longer history of civil-military relations from very formation of the Soviet state. Importantly, from the early days of the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Red Army was continually the subject of deep security anxieties and believed to be under a near-constant threat of subversion. The most serious perceived threats to the Red Army identified by the Bolsheviks before the military purge include:
Former imperial officers from the disbanded Tsarist army. Such officers enlisted in the Red Army during the Russian Civil War and 1920s and brought with them valuable expertise. They were, however, viewed as the enemy within.
Former White officers who had fought against the Bolsheviks during the Civil War similarly enlisted in the Red Army and were regarded with even more suspicion.
‘Foreign agents’ were a constant security anxiety for the Bolsheviks throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Whether British, Polish, Japanese or German, the Bolsheviks saw their army as a prime target for hostile foreign governments.
Leon Trotsky’s opposition platform was quickly identified as a dangerous internal threat to Red Army stability in the mid-1920s and beyond.
Peasant soldiers formed the bulk of the Red Army, but their reliability was always in doubt. During the collectivization drive of the late 1920s and early 1930s, the loyalty of peasant soldiers seriously wavered as the regime dispossessed peasant families of their belongings and forced farmers into collective units. Stalin’s ‘Revolution from above’ threw the fragility of the Red Army into sharp relief.
Rumors of betrayal and conspiracy constantly surrounded the Soviet high command, inside and outside the Soviet Union throughout the entire interwar period. Tukhachevskii in particular was regularly portrayed as a potential ‘Soviet Bonaparte’ and challenger to Stalin. These rumors never dissipated.
In all, over the twenty-year period before the military purge of 1937, there was never a moment that the Bolsheviks believed their army was reliable or secure. When the Great Terror erupted in 1936, the growing wave of political violence and intense pressures placed on state and society brought long-standing security anxieties surrounding the Red Army to a head. The ‘military-fascist plot’ seemed entirely credible to the Stalinist regime in 1937. The military purge was the result of long-standing security anxieties about the Red Army that stretched back to 1917; when these became intertwined with the explosion of political violence during the Great Terror, the Soviet high command was left fatally exposed.
–Written by Peter Whitewood, author of The Red Army and the Great Terror
Peter Whitewood
PhD Student and Postgraduate Tutor
hy06pjw@leeds.ac.uk
Summary: The Red Army and the Terror.
My research: The Red Army and the Terror
My research concentrates on Stalin's purge of the Red Army during the 1930s, which culminated in the trial and execution of members of the General Staff. This military purge is viewed within the background of the Terror more broadly, but also touches upon state - military relations interwar and the importance of the Red Army to the regime. The military purge itself is a remarkable event, considering the context of looming war, and one which has received little study in English language scholarship.
My research examines state - military relations after the 1917 revolution and throughout the Civil War, taking a long view and showing how ties were formed early on between army officers and those later to become political leaders, like Stalin, and how early animosities can help to explain the later Army purge. I also examine Stalin's foreign policy and his use of intelligence as further influences to the fate of his officers.
Using both English and Russian language materials I hope to shed new light on this sub-plot within the Terror, and to further improve our understanding of this defining decade in Russian history.
Funded by: School of History PhD Scholarship
Supervisor: Dr James Harris
About Me
I completed my BA degree in History at Newcastle University in 2006, concentrating where possible on twentieth century Russian history. I then came to Leeds and completed a taught MA in Modern History, which further sharpened my interest in Stalinism and also gave me the opportunity to study a wide range of subjects. Following this I took a PGDip in Russian Language at the University of Glasgow.
Teaching
I teach Historical Skills (HIST1050) using Robert Conquest's 'The Great Terror' as my primary text. I also teach The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union (HIST2301).
Papers Given
'The Red Army and the Terror, 1937-38' - Leeds Postgraduate Colloquium June 2010
'Towards a New History of the Military Purge, 1937-38' at the conference - 'Stalin's Terror: An International Conference' - Leeds, August 2010
Academic-related Activities
I am an undergraduate dissertation mentor at the University of Leeds. I've also delivered mock tutorials.
Funding
I recently got £500 funding from the Royal Historial Society for a research trip to Moscow.
5/15/17, 10(29 AM
Print Marked Items
The Red Army and the Great Terror; Stalin's Purge of the Soviet Military
ProtoView.
(Oct. 2015): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2015 Ringgold, Inc. http://www.protoview.com/protoview
Full Text:
9780700621170
The Red Army and the Great Terror; Stalin's Purge of the Soviet Military Peter Whitewood
University Press of Kansas
2015
360 pages
$37.50
Hardcover
Modern War Studies
DK266
Whitewood examines Joseph Stalin's purge of the Red Army in 1937-38 charging officers of plotting a military-fascist takeover of the government in alliance with Nazi Germany. It was part of the Great Terror, he says, the political violence and repression in the Soviet Union generally during the middle to late 1930s. The purge is credited with the poor showing of the Red Army after Germany attacked in 1941, and with the Western powers refusing to ally with Stalin, considering him unstable and weakened. ([umlaut] Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Red Army and the Great Terror; Stalin's Purge of the Soviet Military." ProtoView, Oct. 2015. PowerSearch,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA430840520&it=r&asid=323f3dbae21809aa613638cd92a32178. Accessed 15 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A430840520
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5/15/17, 10(29 AM
The Red Army and the Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Soviet Military , by Peter Whitewood
Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015. Pp. vii, 360. Notes, index . $37.50. ISBN: 0700621172.
Stalin and the Purge of the Soviet Armed Forces
Stalin hesitated for almost two weeks in May-June 1937 before giving the NKVD the go ahead for the purge of the top Red Army leadership. His response to the growing evidence provided by Nicolai Yezhov was to demote and reassign the main officers, such as Marshal Tukhachevsky, deputy to Kliment Voroshilov, the Soviet Commissar for Defense. On May 10, Tukhachevsky was assigned to command of the Volga Military District. But then something intervened, on May 24th Stalin secured a vote by the Politboro and the marshal and other high ranking officers were all brought back to Moscow and indicted. By June 10th they appeared before a closed military court, were found guilty, and they were shot the following day.
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. Many of them were former tsarist army officers or simply guilty of having "bourgeois" origins, others were unrepentant Trotskyists.
Using Soviet documents and recent Russian language publications, Whitewood shows how fear and denunciation were rampant throughout Soviet society. The exile of Red Army founder Leon Trotsky, by then in Mexico (where he was assassinated in 1940 by the NKVD), was a loyalty test for all members of the Soviet Communist Party and the Red Army in particular. Whitewood follows in the tracks of J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov *, in treating the purge and the terror more as a massive national paranoia than the result of an actual conspiracy. Long standing rivalries between “accidental” soldiers such as Kliment Voroshilov and career officers like Mikhail Tukhachevsky were well known, but not reason enough to unleash such an enormous and crippling bloodletting.
The 1934 murder of Sergei Kirov triggered the Zinoviev-Kamenev-Trotskyist plot trials of 1936 and spread fear that unknown counter-revolutionaries were plotting the murder of Stalin and the Soviet leadership in a military coup. The Anti-Comintern Pact and the Spanish Civil War reinforced the obsession with foreign inspired plots within the Red Army and the party. Whitewood, whose style is marred by frequent repetition and a dry absence of anecdotes, quotes from many speeches by Voroshilov, Gamarnik, and others as they denounced wreckers and saboteurs. Yezhov, who replaced Genrikh Yagoda as head of the NKVD, zealously prepared the evidence for the trials.
The sudden unexplained hesitation on Stalin's part during May 10-27, 1937, a lull in the process of the purge, remains without adequate explanation. Was the dictator showing uncertainty or a sudden fear? Some event made him decide to give Yezhov the final green light. Confessions were extracted through brutal torture during interrogations, followed by mock trials and instant executions. The Great Terror was unleashed. But why? Whitewood's explanation unfortunately remains unsatisfactory when he only states that the symptoms of the Great Terror and the purge of the Red Army were brewing for years and merely required the right circumstances to set off an explosion. In other words the Great Terror was "in the air" rather than instigated.
Dismissing Cold War era explanations, Whitewood quotes Molotov’s memoirs forever justifying Stalin's murderous choices by calling the process a general drift leading to a massive purge of the Red Army -- 35,000 military leaders dismissed and 4,000 executed. By 1939 over one million Soviet citizens were in the Gulag, three quarters of whom were either executed or died of poor treatment. Stalin explained that the generals were about to stage a coup, to overthrow the government and the regime by July 1937, and he therefore had to take action quickly. Documents from the dictator's private secretariat that were immediately swept up by Beria after Stalin's death in 1953, were never recovered.
From the start Whitewood dismisses as unreliable the accounts of dissidents and defectors. In particular Whitewood omits the testimony of Walter G. Krivitsky to the U.S. Congress in 1939 and to MI5 in 1940 that forged documents prepared by the Gestapo were passed on to the Kremlin. Krivitsky claimed Stalin used these forgeries to unleash the purge.
Also not mentioned is the memoir of French counterintelligence officer Col. Paul Paillole** reporting a conversation at the Quai d'Orsay in January 1936, during the Soviet marshal's visit to Paris. Tukhachevsky told a French counterintelligence officer posing as a diplomat that he was to meet with a representative of ROVS, the tsarist officer's group, in London and hinted sarcastically of his little regard for Stalin and his regime. Such statements and attitudes reached the Kremlin and were filed away in Stalin's private archive to be reactivated when required. Or perhaps the Gestapo's dossier suddenly appeared and tipped the balance. Three months after the executions, in September 1937 the head of ROVS, General Evegeny Miller, was kidnapped in Paris, and disappeared into the cellars of the Lubyanka. Whitewood sheds light on some of the mystery, but the deeper secrets of 1937 still elude us.
* J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, eds. The Road to Terror. Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks 1932-1939 (New Haven: Yale, 1999)
** Paul Paillole, Fighting the Nazis. French Military Intelligence and Counterintelligence 1935-1945 (New York: Enigma Books, 2003)
Note: The Red Army and the Great Terror, a volume in the UPK “Modern War Series” is also available in several e-book editions
Our Reviewer: The founder and senior editor of Enigma Books, Robert L. Miller the Executive Director of the New York Military Affairs Symposium, and the author of a number of articles and books, including Hitler at War. His previous reviews include Castro's Secrets: Cuban Intelligence, the CIA, and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam, and The Devils' Alliance: Hitler's Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941
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Reviewer: Robert L. Miller