ABSTRACT
While Marshal Tukhachevsky and his group of officers were waiting for an opportune moment to depose Stalin, he, without knowing of their plot, was fabricating and accumulating ‘evidence’ for a new show trial with Tukhachevsky as the chief villain. Stalin nursed an old grudge against Tukhachevsky dating back to the 19208 when he had started to gather what became known to history as the ‘Tukhachevsky Dossier’. During the First World War, Tukhachevsky, an officer in the Russian Army, had been taken prisoner by the Germans. After the war he had returned to Russia and joined the Bolshevik Party and the Red Army. Because of his Polish name, Lenin and Trotsky appointed him commander of the Warsaw front during the Soviet-Polish war of 1920. Tukhachevsky blamed Stalin for the Red Army’s defeat at Warsaw: Stalin had delayed carrying out Trotsky’s order to send in the First Cavalry to bolster the Red Army at Warsaw. Stalin, in turn, called Tukhachevsky ‘the demon of the Civil War’.1
