Vasily Blyukher Vasily Konstantinovich Blyukher ( also spelled Bliukher , Blücher , etc . , ( ) ( – November 9 , 1938 ) , Soviet military commander , was among the prominent victims of Joseph Stalin ' s Great Purge of the late 1930s . Blyukher was born into a Russian peasant family in village Barschinka , in Yaroslavl Governorate . Despite his German surname , he was not of German descent as is sometimes written : the name was given to his family by a 19th - century landlord after a famous Prussia n Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher . A factory worker before World War I , he joined the army of the Russian Empire in 1914 and served as a corporal until he was discharged in 1915 after being seriously wounded in the Great Retreat of that year . In 1916 he joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party , and took part in the Russian Revolution of 1917 in Samara . In late November 1917 he was sent into Chelyabinsk to suppress Alexander Dutov ' s revolt as Red Guard commissar . Blyukher joined the Red Army in 1918 and was soon a commander . During the Russian Civil War he was one of the outstanding figures on the Bolshevik side . After the Czech Legion Revolt started , in August – September 1918 the 10 , 000 - strong South Urals Partisan Army under Blyukher ' s command marched 1 , 500 km in 40 days of continuous fighting to attack the White forces from the rear , then join with regular Red Army units . For this achievement , in September 1918 he became the first recipient of the Order of the Red Banner ( later he was awarded it four more times : twice in 1921 and twice in 1928 ) , his citation saying : " The raid made by Comrade Blyukher forces under impossible conditions can only be equated with Suvorov ' s crossings in Switzerland . " After the force rejoined the Red Army lines in the 3rd Red Army area , Blyukher ' s force was reorganised as the 51st Division , which he later led to further triumphs against Baron Wrangel in November 1920 . ( John Erickson , 1962 ) After the Civil War , he served as military commander of the Far Eastern Republic in 1921 - 1922 . From 1924 to 1927 Blyukher was a Soviet military adviser in China , where he used the name Galen ( after the name of his wife , Galina ) while attached to Chiang Kai - Shek ' s military headquarters . He was responsible for the military planning of the Northern Expedition which began the Kuomintang unification of China . Among those he instructed in this period was Lin Biao , later a leading figure in the Chinese People ' s Liberation Army . Chiang allowed Blyukher to " escape " after his anti communist purge . On his return he was given command of the Ukraine military district , and then in 1929 he was transferred to the vitally important military command in the Soviet Far East , known as the Special Red Banner Eastern Army ( OKDVA ) . Based at Khabarovsk , Blyukher exercised a degree of autonomy in the Far East unusual for a Soviet military commander . With Japan steadily extending its grip on China and hostile to the Soviet Union , the Far East was an active military command . In the Russo - Chinese Chinese Eastern Railroad War of 1929 - 1930 he defeated the Chinese warlord forces in a quick campaign . For this outstanding achievement he became the first recipient of the Order of the Red Star in September 1930 . In 1935 he was made a Marshal of the Soviet Union . In July and August 1938 he commanded the Soviet Far East Front in a less decisive action against the Japanese at the Battle of Lake Khasan , on the border between the Soviet Union and Japanese - occupied Korea . The importance of the Far East Front gave Blyukher a certain degree of immunity from Stalin ' s purge of Red Army command , which had begun in 1937 with the execution of Mikhail Tukhachevsky . In fact , Blyukher had been a member of the tribunal that convicted Tukhachevsky . In 1938 he was accused of inadequate armed forces leadership during the battle of Lake Khasan and dismissed from his post . On October 22 he was arrested , convicted of espionage for Japan . A contributory factor in Blyukher ' s downfall was the defection to Japan in June , 1938 , of the NKVD chief in the Far East , Genrikh Lyushkov , who feared arrest . In prison Blyukher refused to confess and was never formally tried . He was severely tortured in Lefortovo jail in Moscow , which according to one source led to his death on November 9 , 1938 , though another says he was shot on Joseph Stalin ' s orders . When people began to ask on his whereabouts they were told that he was fighting in China under a pseudonym . His death was officially known in 1956 when he was posthumously rehabilitated .