Letter to K.E. Voroshilov, March 23, 1930

Source: Tom 17

Top secret.

Comrade Voroshilov,

I received both documents -- Comrade Tukhachevsky's explanatory memorandum and the General Staff's "considerations." You know that I greatly respect Comrade Tukhachevsky as an extraordinarily capable comrade. But I did not expect that a Marxist, who should not lose touch with reality, could advocate such a fantastical "plan," completely divorced from reality. His "plan" lacks the main thing, namely, an accounting of the real possibilities of an economic, financial, and cultural nature. This "plan" fundamentally disrupts every conceivable and permissible proportion between the army as a part of the country and the country as a whole, with its economic and cultural limits. The "plan" slides into the viewpoint of "purely military" people, who frequently forget that the army is a derivative of the country's economic and cultural condition.

How could such a "plan" have arisen in the mind of a Marxist who has been through the school of the civil war?

I think that Tukhachevsky's "plan" is the result of a fashionable infatuation with "left" phraseology, the result of an infatuation with paper-based, bureaucratic maximalism. That is why analysis has been replaced in it by "playing with numbers," and a Marxist perspective on the growth of the Red Army has been replaced by fantasy.

To "implement" such a "plan" would mean certainly ruining both the country's economy and the army. This would be worse than any counter-revolution.

It is gratifying that the Staff of the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, despite the danger of temptation, clearly and definitively distanced itself from Comrade Tukhachevsky's "plan."

March 23, 1930

Yours,

I. Stalin.

Source: Istoricheskiy arkhiv. 1998. No. 5-6. Pp. 150-151.

RGASPI. F. 74. Op. 2. D. 38. L. 58.

NOTE

On January 11, 1930, the commander of the Leningrad Military District M.N. Tukhachevsky addressed the People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs and the Chief of Armaments of the Red Army with a memorandum proposing that the peacetime Red Army should have 260 rifle and cavalry divisions, 50 artillery divisions of the Supreme Command Reserve (not counting heavy artillery and mortars), 225 machine-gun battalions, 40,000 aircraft, and 50,000 tanks. By order of K.E. Voroshilov, Tukhachevsky's project was reviewed by the Red Army General Staff. In the conclusion prepared by B.M. Shaposhnikov, it stated that "the economic growth of our Union and the available trained reserves do not yet provide, in my opinion, the possibility of realizing the proposed army of 245 rifle divisions."

Stalin's letter was read aloud by Voroshilov at the session of the Revolutionary Military Council of the USSR on April 13, 1930.

See also: Letter to M.N. Tukhachevsky, May 7, 1932.