[2][3][4] He later served as chief of staff of the Red Army from 1925 to 1928, as assistant in the People's Commissariat of Defense[5] after 1934 and as commander of the Volga Military District in 1937.

Soviet authorities accused Tukhachevsky of treason, and after he confessed during torture, he was executed in 1937 during the military purges of 1936–1938, led by Stalin and Nikolai Yezhov.

Tukhachevsky was born at Alexandrovskoye, Safonovsky District (in the present-day Smolensk Oblast of Russia), into a family of impoverished hereditary nobles.

[6] Legend states that his family descended from a Flemish count who ended up stranded in the East during the Crusades and took a Turkish wife before settling in Russia.

At the outset of the First World War, he joined the Semyenovsky Guards Regiment (July 1914) as a second lieutenant, declaring: I am convinced that all that is needed in order to achieve what I want is bravery and self-confidence.

[10]Taken prisoner by the Imperial German Army in February 1915, Tukhachevsky escaped four times from prisoner-of-war camps and was finally held as an incorrigible escapee in Ingolstadt fortress in Bavaria.

[12] Tukhachevsky played his violin, assailed nihilist beliefs and spoke against Christians and Jews, whom he called dogs who "spread their fleas throughout the world".

After ranting about how he could use Marxism as a justification to secure the territorial aims of the tsars and cement Russia's position as a world power, he laughed and said he was only joking.

[15] On another occasion, following the February Revolution, Roure observed Tukhachevsky carving a "scary idol from colored cardboard", with "burning eyes", a "gaping mouth", and a "bizarre and terrible nose".

[15] Tukhachevsky's fifth escape met with success, and after crossing the Swiss-German border and carrying with him some small pagan idols,[17] he returned to Russia in September 1917.

[citation needed] The Bolshevik Defence Commissar, Leon Trotsky, gave Tukhachevsky command of the 5th Army in 1919, and he led the campaign to capture Siberia from the anticommunist White forces of Aleksandr Kolchak.

When he issued his troops orders to cross the border, Tukhachevsky said, "The fate of world revolution is being decided in the west: the way leads over the corpse of Poland to a universal conflagration.... On to Wilno, Minsk, and Warsaw – forward!

His supply services were in chaos and his rear scarcely existed as an organized entity, but Tukhachevsky was unconcerned; his men would live off the land.

[5] In contrast, German divisions that mobilised shortly after during the interwar period had telephones, radio, horse, cycle and motorcycle messengers, signal lights and flags and pieces of cloth, and messages were conveyed mostly to aircraft.

[27] Upon Stalin's ascension to the party leadership in 1929, he began receiving denunciations from senior officers who disapproved of Tukhachevsky's tactical theories.

In 1930, the Joint State Political Directorate forced two officers to testify that Tukhachevsky was plotting to overthrow the Politburo via a coup d'état.

The archives reveal a fascinating sequel: once he understood the ambitious modernity of Tukhachevsky's strategies, Stalin apologised to him: "Now the question has become clearer to me, I have to agree that my remark was too strong and my conclusions were not right at all.

It is often stated that the widespread purges of the Red Army officer corps in 1937 to 1939 made "deep operation" briefly fall from favour.

[35] However, it was certainly a major part of Soviet doctrine after its efficacy was demonstrated by the Battle of Khalkin Gol and the success of similar German operations in Poland and France.

The doctrine was used with great success during World War II on the Eastern Front in such victories as the Battle of Stalingrad [citation needed] and Operation Bagration.

[19] According to Montefiore, a few days later, as Yezhov buzzed in and out of Stalin's office, a broken Tukhachevsky confessed that Avel Yenukidze had recruited him in 1928 and that he was a German agent co-operating with Nikolai Bukharin to seize power.

In his 1968 book The Great Terror, the British historian Robert Conquest accuses Nazi Party leaders Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich of forging documents that implicated Tukhachevsky in an anti-Stalinist conspiracy with the Wehrmacht General Staff, to weaken the Soviets' defence capacity.

[45] In 1989, the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union announced that new evidence had been found in Stalin's archives indicating German intelligence's intentions to fabricate disinformation about Tukhachevsky with the goal of eliminating him.

At Yezhov's order, the NKVD had instructed a known double agent, Nikolai Skoblin, to leak to Heydrich's Sicherheitsdienst (SD) concocted information suggesting a plot by Tukhachevsky and the other Soviet generals against Stalin.

While the SD believed that it had successfully fooled Stalin into executing his best generals, in reality, it had merely served as an unwitting pawn of the Soviet NKVD.

[45] In 1956, the NKVD defector Aleksandr Mikhailovich Orlov published an article in Life Magazine with "The Sensational Secret Behind the Damnation of Stalin" as title.

[50] Simon Sebag Montefiore, who has conducted extensive research in Soviet archives, states: Stalin needed neither Nazi disinformation nor mysterious Okhrana files to persuade him to destroy Tukhachevsky.

Ultimately, Stalin and Yezhov would orchestrate the arrest and execution of thousands of Soviet military officers as well as five of the eight generals who presided over Tukhachevsky's show trial.

[5] In peacetime, cavalry made sense to the Red Army; it was effective in smaller actions and internal security actions, many horse riders were available without requiring significant training, and there were the memories of the effectiveness of cavalry during the Civil War, all of which helped the horse in maintaining its central position inside the Red Army.

[5] When the Second World War began mixed units were set up, which included both cavalry and tanks; these played a central role in use of the deep operations doctrine during WWII.