Whitewood, Peter The Red Army and the Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Soviet Military (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 561 Whitewood, Peter. The Red Army and the Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Soviet Military. Modern War Studies. University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, 2015. vii + 360 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $37.50. In the introduction to his new history of Stalin’s pre-war purge of the Red Army, Peter Whitewood declares boldly: ‘I offer an entirely new explanation for the purge’ (p. 2). Using ‘huge amounts of previously inaccessible documents from the Russian archives’ (p. 7) he questions ‘Cold War accounts’ — a term he deploys as an epithet a dozen times in his short introduction. These earlier works, by scholars such as Adam Ulam, Robert Tucker and Robert Conquest portrayed Stalin’s assault on the Soviet officer corps as one facet of the dictator’s premeditated, violent quest to subordinate all branches of government and society to his personal rule. By contrast, Whitewood argues that, far from being a well-planned decapitation of the military by a ruthless dictator who justified mass arrests using evidence he knew to be unreliable or even fabricated, Stalin’s army purge ‘appears’ to have been a ‘hesitant, last minute, almost reluctant’ (p. 271) act of ‘an indecisive leader’ (p. 281). ‘Moreover,’ Whitewood declares, ‘there is nothing to suggest that this spy scare in the military was cynically contrived. Stalin seems to have genuinely believed that foreign-backed enemies had infiltrated the ranks and managed to organize a conspiracy at the very heart of the Red Army’ (p. 276). Despite the book’s title, this is no comprehensive study of the Red Army purge. Whitewood writes little about how Stalin actually purged the army, the fate of individual officers, the consequences of the purge on foreign perceptions of Soviet strength, nor its impact on the effectiveness of the Soviet military. Instead, he devotes more than two-thirds of the book to the first two decades of Soviet power, leaving little space for the purge itself, and almost none for its wider consequences. These early chapters are the book’s strongest. Whitewood shows how ‘Stalin was never able to put his full trust in the military’ (p. 280). From the earliest days of the Revolution through the succeeding two decades, Soviet security services suspected officers of sympathizing with the Bolsheviks’ ‘White’ enemies during the Civil War, anti-Communist émigrés during the 1920s, the peasantry during the collectivization of agriculture and Trotskyists during the 1930s. As the threat from Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan grew, the secret police fretted that officers were in league with these foreign enemies. Of the actual purge, Whitewood asks: ‘Why would Stalin build with one hand and destroy with the other? Why actively prepare for war while weakening the Red Army through a mass purge?’ (p. 2). His answer is that the head of the Army, Klimenty Voroshilov, failed adequately to cleanse the ranks of unspecified ‘foreign agents and treacherous former oppositionists’ (p. 284). This alleged failure enabled Nikolai Ezhov, the sinister head of the NKVD, to concoct ‘fascist’ plots, producing evidence extracted by torture and forced SEER, 94, 3, july 2016 562 confessions to link leading officers to foreign, especially Nazi, intelligence. Although Whitewood notes repeatedly that ‘The military-fascist plot had no basis in reality’ (p. 268), he insists that Stalin believed Ezhov’s dark fantasies. Here one encounters the central problem of this study. Although Whitewood uses newly available documents, very few of these originate from the highest levels,whichremainclosedtoresearchers.ItishardtoknowwhatStalinhimself was thinking or planning, and he was not one to share his reasons. Whitewood resorts distressingly often to conjecture, not all of which is persuasive. In one single, short paragraph he tries to explain Stalin’s motives, using the following phrases: ‘it suggests’, ‘[he] appears hesitant’, ‘he seems to have waited’, ‘Stalin presumably wanted’, ‘Stalin faced little choice but to opt for’, ‘it is reasonable to suggest’, ‘perhaps even from a sense of panic’, and ‘the military purge may have sparked the mass operations’ (pp. 271–72). As Winston Churchill said in a different context, ‘the terrible “ifs” accumulate’. Whitewood does not explain how Voroshilov can be faulted for failing to root out enemies, when by Whitewood’s own admission these enemies...