ABSTRACT
At the 16th Party Congress, which opened its proceedings on 26th June, 1930, Shaposhnikov led a delegation of senior non-Party commanders which presented its own approval of the policy of industrialisation and set down a criticism of the 'Right deviationists' who sought to impede these plans. Prevailing policy at this time fostered the cultivation of the non-Party senior military experts, and this demonstration at the 16th Congress marked the affirmation of a curious alliance of interests and a gesture of support for a policy from which the Red Army had been noted down as the principal beneficiary. It was in 1930 that Shaposhnikov became a member of the Communist Party,2 thus adding a formal political allegiance to what had been a showing of personal loyalty and professional service to the Soviet
the military in that compact group, subject to ever-increasing centralisation, through which Stalin directed the major policies of the Soviet Union, in a manner which corresponded faithfully to the combined directorate which Shaposhnikov had been at such lengthy pains to depict. Gamarnik's appointment in June 1930, as Deputy Commissar to Voroshilov and deputy president of the Soviet Union Revvoensoviet underlined the vital part which the political command had to play in holding the army loyal during this critical period. Tukhachevsky remained the singular figure in the command. His virtual banishment from the centre of Red Army affairs, contrived under Voroshilov and relieved only by a brief restoration to the Staff as head of the Operations Directorate during the 1929 Manchurian crisis, seems to have had no effect on his influence as a leading Soviet military theoretician. Although in no way as yet specifically associated with the traffic with the Reichswehr, this does not suppose that he was not abreast of events and developments from that quarter. In 1929-30 Tukhachevsky had already taken serious issue over the problems of re-organising the Red Army on the lines of a small highly-mobile elite force. His personal preview of a future war, published in 1928, envisaged the employment of mass armies and total mobilisation, although it set Tukhachevsky in the midst of the quandaries of mass against mobility, quantity against quality as soon as he introduced new technical factors. In the midst of a controversy, which was in full swing by 1930 and would increase in intensity, Tukhachevsky associated himself with the younger commanders eager to develop the full potentialities of new weapons.
