Letter to M.N. Tukhachevsky, May 7, 1932

Source: Tom 17

To Comrade Tukhachevsky.

Copy to Comrade Voroshilov.

The attached letter addressed to Comrade Voroshilov was written by me in March 1930. It refers to two documents: (a) your "memorandum" on expanding our army to bring the number of divisions up to 246 or 248 (I do not remember exactly); (b) the "considerations" of our General Staff concluding that your "memorandum" in effect requires bringing the army's strength up to 11 million men, and that your "memorandum" is therefore unrealistic, fantastic, and beyond our country's capacity.

In my letter to Comrade Voroshilov, as you know, I essentially concurred with the conclusions of our General Staff and expressed myself sharply against your "memorandum," calling it the product of "bureaucratic maximalism," the result of "playing with figures," and so on.

That was two years ago.

Now, two years later, when certain unclear questions have become clearer to me, I must acknowledge that my assessment was too harsh and the conclusions of my letter not entirely correct.

First, closer acquaintance with the matter has shown that the figure of "11 million men" does not follow from your "memorandum," since what your "memorandum" can require and actually does require is an army of 8 million men. Of course, an army of 8 million is also unrealistic, unnecessary, and beyond our country's capacity -- at least in the next three to four years (to say nothing of the first Five-Year Plan). But 8 million is still not 11 million.

Second, there is no doubt that the changed character of armies in recent years, the growth of military transport technology and the development of aviation, the appearance of mechanized units and the corresponding reorganization of the army -- all create an entirely new situation that deprives the old disputes about a large number of divisions of their decisive significance. There is no need to prove that not the quantity of divisions, but above all their quality, their saturation with technology, will henceforth play the decisive role. I think you will agree with me that a 6-million-man army, well supplied with technology and organized along new lines, will be fully sufficient to defend our country's independence on all fronts without exception. And such an army is more or less within our capacity. It seems to me that my letter to Comrade Voroshilov would not have been so harsh in tone and would have been free of certain incorrect conclusions regarding you, had I shifted the argument to this new basis at the time. But I did not do so, since evidently the problem was not yet sufficiently clear to me.

Do not blame me for having taken up the correction of the shortcomings of my letter with some delay.

May 7, 1932

With communist greetings,

I. Stalin.

Source: Istoricheskii arkhiv [Historical Archive], 1998, Nos. 5-6, pp. 151-152.

RGASPI, f. 74, op. 2, d. 38, ll. 56-57.

NOTE

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