Page 124 - The Chief Culprit

About the Brilliant Military Leader Tukhachevski y 85

that in 1920 Tukhachevski was defeated by the Polish cavalry, but if he had lived until 1941
and met the German tank armadas he undoubtedly would have defeated them. Lenin and
Trotsky did not think so. ey understood that Tukhachevski was only good for war against
his own people. erefore, he was once again sent to the inside front—to drown under ice
the sailors who started the uprising at Kronstadt, to shoot hostages in Tambov county, and to
burn villages. Here, Tukhachevski showed a true strategic talent.
Tukhachevski strove to get power in the stupidest way. He made a bigger fool of himself
than anyone in the Civil War, and yet he declared himself a winner. He decided to personally
edit the three-volume book Civil War, 1918–1921, portraying himself as a great strategist and
blaming others for his defeats. Here it must be stressed that Tukhachevski strove specifically to
edit history, not write it. Everyone who has read Tukhachevski’s book, March beyond Vistula
(Pokhod za Vislu), would agree that Tukhachevski was incapable of relating his thoughts.
Marshal Joseph Pilsudsky crushed Tukhachevski, first on the battlefields and later in the pages
of his book e Year 1920. Pilsudsky exposed both Tukhachevski’s incapability to fight and
his incapability to relate past events. Pilsudsky did not leave any part of Tukhachevski’s book
standing: “ e extreme vagueness of the book gives us the image of a man who analyzes only
his own brain or his heart, purposefully rejecting or simply not knowing how to tie his own
thoughts with the everyday existence of troops, which not always corresponds to the plans
and intentions of their commander, but often contradicts them. . . . Many events in the
operations of 1920 occurred as they did precisely because [of] Tukhachevski’s propensity to
command the army with such an abstract method.”
Legend number two: Tukhachevski proposed to Stalin a plan for modernizing the army.
is legend is also easy to disperse. For this, one only needs to read Tukhachevski’s “scien-
tific works.” Only someone who himself has not read Tukhachevski’s creations can praise his
work. Aside from using purposefully incomprehensible terms and long phrases, the meaning
of which can be interpreted in any way one wants, Tukhachevski had one more weakness—he
did not understand the significance of numbers. He always wanted to astound the reader and
listener with unbelievable numbers.
“Multi-million [strong] armies deployed on the fronts stretching hundreds of thousands
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of kilometers.” is is how Tukhachevski describes World War I. Fronts stretching hundreds
of thousands of kilometers? Is this not nonsense? France, Britain, their vassals from the colo-
nies, and later the United States fought against Germany. e Western front stretched from
the shores of the North Sea to the Swiss border. In a straight line, this does not even make five
hundred kilometers. A front is obviously not drawn in a straight line. But even with all pos-
sible bends and turns, one cannot scrounge up enough for a thousand kilometers. And all the
millions of French, British, Australian, New Zealander, Canadian, and then American troops
in World War I were positioned along these kilometers. If the front had stretched hundreds of
thousands of kilometers, how many millions of soldiers would be needed to cover it?
e Eastern front in World War I stretched from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. is
is less than two thousand kilometers. e front was not a straight line, so let us assume three
thousand kilometers. Where did fronts stretching hundreds of thousands of kilometers come
from? If the northern hemisphere had fought against the southern, and the trenches were dug
along the bottom of the seas and oceans, even then we would still only get forty thousand
kilometers. Did Tukhachevski know the length of the equator? Where, on this small planet,
could one find fronts hundreds of thousands of kilometers in length?