Case of Trotskyist Anti - Soviet Military Organization The Case of Trotskyist Anti - Soviet Military Organization ( or " дело антисоветской троцкистской военной организации " , also known as the " Military Case " ( ) or the " Tukhachevsky Case " ) was a 1937 secret trial of the high command of the Red Army , a part of the Great Purge . Defendants . The Case of Military was a secret trial , unlike the Moscow Show Trials . It is traditionally considered one of the key trials of the Great Purge . Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and the senior military officers Iona Yakir , Ieronim Uborevich , Robert Eideman , August Kork , Vitovt Putna , Boris Feldman and Vitaly Primakov ( as well as Yakov Gamarnik , who committed suicide before the investigations began ) were accused of anti - Soviet conspiracy and sentenced to death ; they were executed on the night of June 11 – 12 , 1937 , immediately after the verdict delivered by a Special Session ( специальное судебное присутствие ) of the Supreme Court of the USSR . The Tribunal was presided over by Vasili Ulrikh and included marshals Vasily Blyukher , Semyon Budyonny and Army Commanders Yakov Alksnis , Boris Shaposhnikov , Ivan Belov , Pavel Dybenko , and Nikolai Kashirin . Only Ulrikh , Budyonny and Shaposhnikov would survive the purge s that followed . The trial triggered a massive subsequent purge of the Red Army . In September 1938 the People ' s Commissar for Defense , Kliment Voroshilov , reported that a total of 37 , 761 officers and commissars were dismissed from the army , 10 , 868 were arrested and 7 , 211 were condemned for anti - Soviet crimes . Background . The trial was preceded by several purges of the Red Army . In the mid - 1920s , Leon Trotsky was removed as Commissar of War , and his known supporters were expunged from the military . Former tsarist officers had been purged in the late 1920s and early 1930s . The latter purge was accompanied by the " exposure " of the " Former Officers Plot " . The next wave of arrests of military commanders started in the second half of 1936 and increased in scope after the February – March 1937 Plenary Meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ( CPSU ) , at which Vyacheslav Molotov called for more thorough exposure of " wreckers " within the Red Army , since they " had already been found in all segments of the Soviet economy " . Evidence , arrest , and secret trial . General Mikhail Tukhachevsky was arrested on May 22 , 1937 and charged , along with seven other Red Army commanders , with the creation of a " right - wing - Trotskyist " military conspiracy and espionage for Nazi Germany , based on confessions obtained from a number of other arrested officers . Before 1990 , it was frequently argued that the case against the eight generals was based on forged documents created by the Abwehr , documents which deluded Stalin into believing that a plot was being fomented by Tukhachevsky and other Red Army commanders to depose him . However , after Soviet archives were opened to researchers after the fall of the Soviet Union , it became clear that Stalin actually concocted the fictitious plot by the most famous and important of his Soviet generals in order to get rid of them in a believable manner . At Stalin ' s order , the NKVD instructed one of its agents , Nikolai Skoblin , to pass to Reinhard Heydrich , chief of the German Nazi SD ( " Sicherheitsdienst " ) intelligence arm , concocted information suggesting a plot by Tukhachevsky and the other Soviet generals against Stalin . Seeing an opportunity to strike a blow at both the Soviet Union and his arch - enemy Admiral Canaris of the German Abwehr , Heydrich immediately acted on the information and undertook to improve on it , forging a series of documents implicating Tukhachevsky and other Red Army commanders ; these were later passed to the Soviets via Beneš and other neutral parties . Joseph Stalin ' s archives indeed contain a number of messages received during 1920 – 30s duly reporting the possible involvement of Tukhachevsky with the " German Nazi leadership " . While the Germans believed they had successfully deluded Stalin into executing his best generals , in reality they had merely served as useful and unwitting pawns of Stalin . It is notable that the forged documents were not even used by Soviet military prosecutors against the generals in their secret trial , instead relying on false confessions extorted or beaten out of the defendants . Afraid of the consequences of trying popular generals and war heroes in a public forum , Stalin ordered the trial also be kept secret , and that the defendants be executed immediately following their court - martial . Tukhachevsky and his fellow defendants were probably tortured into confessions . All convicts were rehabilitate d on January 31 , 1957 citing " absence of essence of an offence " . It was concluded that arrests , investigations and trials were performed in violation of procedural norms and based on forced confession s , in many cases obtained with the aid of physical violence . Unresolved issues . Reasons and motives . There are no conclusive facts about the real rationale behind the forged trial . Over the years , researchers and historians put forth the following hypotheses . The central hypothesis , and the one with the widest support , is that Stalin had simply decided to consolidate his power by eliminating any and all potential political or military rivals . Viewed from the broader context of the Great Terror which followed , the execution of the most popular and well - regarded generals in the Red Army command can be seen as a preemptive move by Stalin and Nikolai Yezhov , People ' s Commissar of State Security , to eliminate a potential rival and source of opposition to their planned purge of the nomenklatura . The fall of the first eight generals was swiftly followed by the arrest of most of the People ' s Commissars , nearly all regional party secretaries , hundreds of Central Committee members and candidates , and thousands of lesser CPSU officials . At the end , three of five Soviet Marshals , 90 % of all Red Army generals , 80 % of Red Army colonels , and 30 , 000 officers of lesser rank had been purged . Virtually all were executed . At first it was thought 25 - 50 % of Red Army officers were purged , it is now known to be 3 . 7 - 7 . 7 % . Previously , the size of the Red Army officer corps was underestimated and it was overlooked that most of those purged were merely expelled from the Party . 30 % of officers purged 1937 - 9 were allowed back . Another suggestion is that Tukhachevsky and others did indeed try to conspire against Stalin . Leon Trotsky in his later works argued that while it was impossible to speak conclusively about the plot , he saw indications in Stalin ' s mania for involvement in every detail of Red Army organization and logistics that the military had real reasons for dissent , motives which may have eventually led to a plot . However , the revelations of Stalin ' s actions following the release of Soviet archival information have now largely discredited this theory . While the military may well have had many secret reasons for their dislike of Stalin , there is now no credible evidence that any of them ever conspired to eliminate him . Speedy inquest . Vadim Rogovin ' s book " 1937 : Stalin ' s Year of Terror " contains a lengthy discussion of another unexplained mystery : it took only about two weeks to force admission of guilt from the accused , despite the fact that all of them , were relatively young , able - bodied military trained people . Rogovin contrasts it with the Jewish Anti - Fascist Committee , where the inquest lasted about 4 years , despite brutal tortures . One possible explanation is that the Soviet commanders , after a life of military service , could not stand up psychologically to the position of opposing their commander - in - chief . Another is that the men may have been tricked into signing confessions in the belief that their lives or those of their families would be spared , a tactic sometimes employed by Stalin .