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    Assassinations Anthology
    Assassinations Anthology
    Assassinations Anthology
    Ebook304 pages4 hours

    Assassinations Anthology

    By John Grehan, Adrian Gilbert, Nigel West and

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    A fascinating look at what might have happened had historical assassination attempts succeeded.
     
    If Hitler had died at any stage in the Second World War, would Germany have immediately sued for peace, or would the generals have taken over and fought a far more practical war than the obdurate Führer? Equally intriguing is the possible failed assassination attempt on General de Gaulle on British soil. Who, one wonders, was behind that scheme, and how would Anglo-French relations have developed if he had been killed?
     
    In Assassinations Anthology, a number of well-known authors and historians look at past events where key individuals were involved in either attempts on their lives, or strange incidents occurred which, had they led to their deaths, might have radically affected the outcome of the war. Events surrounding Hitler and Operation Valkyrie, Stalin and Jan Smuts are investigated, as well as the peculiar circumstances relating to the theft of a valuable Gainsborough painting. Just how great a role did the Government’s Chief Whip, David Margesson, play in persuading the MPs to accept the unpopular Winston Churchill as Prime Minister, and what would have happened if Margesson had been killed when the Gainsborough disappeared? It is fascinating stuff. Grounded in actual events, the various scenarios portrayed in this collection examine the likely chain of events that would have followed if the assassination attempts had succeeded. A few inches, a few minutes—that was all the difference between life and death, and between the past that we know and one that we can only imagine.
     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateSep 30, 2017
    ISBN9781526700292
    Assassinations Anthology

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      Book preview

      Assassinations Anthology - John Grehan

      Chapter 1

      Killing The Red Tsar

      The Assassination of Joseph Stalin, 1937

      By Peter G. Tsouras

      It was late 1936. The NKVD ¹ official sat back in his chair aghast, his eyes as big as saucers. I.L. Shtern was no ordinary member of the Soviet secret police. He was working on a mission directly from the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the GENSEC himself, Josef Stalin. Shtern’s chief, the People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs and head of the NKVD, Genrikh G. Yagoda, had given him the orders himself.

      Stalin’s special target had been for two years now the old Bolshevik elite that had carried the Party from revolution through civil war to the victory of the establishment of Soviet power. No one but Stalin must be left to claim the legacy of Lenin. Stalin had mentioned to Yagoda that evidence of collusion with the Tsar’s secret police, the Okhrana, might be found to bring his enemies down. So it was that Shtern was looking through the old files of the Okhrana in the NKVD’s main headquarters on Lubyanka Square in Moscow.

      What Shtern had found had terrified him to the core of his being. And he had every reason to be terrified. The Great Terror was already unfolding in waves of arrest in 1936. Already hundreds of thousands had been arrested, half of them shot, and the rest sent to a short life in the camps of the growing concentration camp system, the GULAG². Russia had not known such terror since the paranoid madness of Ivan the Terrible had nearly destroyed the Russian state. The sight of NKVD men with their telltale green collar tabs was enough to terrify anyone. He ought to know for he was one of them.

      Now there it was in the files, the object of his fear, the name of Iosif V. Dzhugashvilli. That was Stalin’s own Georgian name (Stalin was his revolutionary nom de guerre), and it was not there as an object of surveillance. He was a double agent for the Okhrana working to betray his own revolutionary colleagues. And his reports were there in his own handwriting with which Shtern was intimately familiar. ‘Shto delo?’ (‘What to do?’) he asked himself. It was more than a profound question; it was a mortal question at a time when the least suspicion, or none at all, could lead to a sudden arrest, brutal torture, and a bullet in the back of the head in a white-tiled NKVD execution room. Such a fate would be ensured if he showed the papers to Yagoda.³

      Instead Shtern took the paper to his old boss, Vsevolod A. Balitsky, the head of the NKVD in the Ukraine. In turn, Balitsky informed his deputy, Zinovy Katsnelson, who was also a member of the Central Committee of the CPSU. They subjected the papers to a rigorous examination, even calling in a handwriting expert. When they were satisfied, Balitsky sought out the Red Army’s commander of the Ukraine Military District, in whom he had implicit trust.⁴

      Army Commander 1st Rank, Iona Emmanuilovich Yakir, was one of the most distinguished heroes of the Civil War and three-time winner of the Order of the Red Banner.⁵ Since 1925 he had transformed the foremost military district in the country into a test bed for the rapid and innovative development of the Red Army. For two years (1928-1929) he had studied at the German higher military academy and earned the praise of the German president and former field marshal, Paul von Hindenburg, as one of the most talented commanders of the post-war era. Returning to his military district, he was a moving force in the creation of the first large armoured and air force formations in the world, working closely to mould these formations to execute the concept of deep operations, the brainchild of the First Vice-Commissar of Defence, Marshal of the Soviet Union Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevsky. He earned Stalin’s spite for inviting Tukhachevsky to teach a special course on the theory of deep operations to senior officers. He did it despite knowing of Stalin’s dislike of Tukhachevsky. In retaliation Stalin cut the Ukraine Military District into two to limit Yakir’s power and excluded him from higher bodies to which his efforts had earned him a place.

      By 1935 Tukhachevsky, hero of the Russian Civil War, was acknowledged as a combat commander of genius, an original theorist, and a superb organizer. Under his guidance, the Red Army blossomed into the most innovative armed force in the world and was promoted to the newly created rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union, one of only five. Thanks to Stalin’s industrialization of the Soviet Union, tanks and aircraft of the latest designs and in huge numbers poured from the new factories to the Red Army. Its large armoured and air formations and its development of airborne forces were ongoing creative experiments on a scale that dwarfed the timid steps of the rest of the world’s armies. At a time when the brilliant British military reformer, Major General J.F.C. Fuller, sold perhaps five hundred copies in the UK of his seminal work on the principles of war and mechanized operations, Tukhachevsky had it translated and a copy given to every one of the Red Army’s several hundred thousand strong officer corps. Alas, for Fuller, the Soviet Union had not signed the international copyright convention. Tukhachevsky was doing what the theorists of modern war in the West, Fuller and Liddell Hart in Britain and De Gaulle in France, could only dream of. Only Heinz Guderian in Germany came close. After Hitler watched a panzer demonstration and exclaimed, ‘That’s what I want!’ did Germany begin to pour the resources into building the modern, mechanized army that Tukhachevsky had already fashioned.⁶

      Who was this remarkable man? This hero of the Red Army of Workers and Peasants, to it give its full title, had been a scion of the Russian Empire’s hereditary nobility. The Tukhachevsky name appeared prominently in the Velvet Book of the Russian aristocracy. Even as a Marshal of the Soviet Union, he was proud to say that the ring on his finger had been worn by an ancestor who had fought Napoleon at Borodino in 1812.⁷ After graduating from a military academy in 1914 at the age of twenty-one, he had joined the Semenovkiy Guards Regiment, the second most prestigious regiment in the imperial army. He was nothing but confident of his abilities and wrote. ‘I am convinced that all that is needed in order to achieve what I want is bravery and self-confidence. I certainly have enough self-confidence … I told myself that I shall either be a general at thirty, or that I shall not be alive by then.’ As a young officer he idealized the military exploits of Napoleon.

      Captured during the great retreat of 1915 in the First World War, he escaped four times from the Germans but was recaptured each time and finally sent to a camp for incorrigibles at Ingolstadt in Bavaria from which his fifth attempt was successful. He made his way back to Russia just in time for the 1917 Revolution, threw in his lot with the Reds, and never looked back. He became a committed communist, and his military talents were so evident that he rose like a star in the ranks of the Red Army, beating his prediction by becoming a general at the age of twenty-five when the founder of the Red Army, Leon Trotsky, gave him command of the defence of Moscow. By 1919 he was commanding an army and defeated the forces of the White Admiral Kolchak in Siberia. The next year he took the lead in defeating the White forces of General Denikin, and in 1921 he crushed the revolt of the sailors at Kronstadt who had had the audacity to demand that the Bolsheviks actually live up to their human rights and economic promises. The following year he crushed the Tambov Republic. In all this, he was ‘as ruthless as any Bolshevik’ resorting without hesitation to the shooting of hostages and using poison gas on the peasants of Tambov.⁸

      Tukhachevsky’s only defeat occurred during the Red Army’s invasion of Poland in 1920. Despite that defeat, the Polish Marshal Pilsudski had the highest praise for him. ‘Tukhachevsky inspired his subordinates by virtue of his energetic and purposeful work. This fine quality of leadership stamps him forever as a general with daring ideas and the gift of putting them into vigorous execution. … Tukhachevsky handled his troops very skillfully, and anyone can easily discern the signs of a general of the first order in his daring but logically correct march on Warsaw.’⁹

      That defeat was largely due to the insubordination of his commanders, and in Stalin’s case, to outright sabotage. The future marshal had not held his tongue to say who was at fault. The two had already come into conflict in the fighting at Tsaritsyn on the Volga, the city that Stalin would later name for himself. The intervening years had done nothing to lessen the bad blood between the two, though outwardly they were on cordial terms.

      Tukhachevsky had nevertheless stood aside, as good Party member, as Stalin cemented his power and began to kill on a level that no tsar, burdened with a religious conscious, would have dared to. The created famine, now known as the Holodomor (Murder by Hunger) of 1932-33 starved from seven to ten million Ukrainians to death. The German consul (Weimar Republic) in Kiev was reporting that the NKVD was periodically rounding up hordes of orphan children to shoot them in the woods and that people were dropping dead in the streets. A million Kazaks also died that winter, and the homeland of the Cossacks in the Kuban directly to the east of the Ukraine was so depopulated that one observer noted it would have to be recolonized.¹⁰ Yes, in turning his back on this horror, Tukhachevsky was a good son of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). He was also a dead man.

      Tukhachevsky’s death warrant had already been determined by the GENSEC in 1936. Stalin hated, and when he hated, he feared, and when he feared, he killed. Tukhachevsky had disregarded the advice that when you clash with a Georgian, such as Stalin, you either defeat or conciliate him. Otherwise he will nurse his grudge and see his opponent repaid with terrible interest. Georgians were famous for their patience in serving up stone cold revenge. At a dinner party Stalin attended in the 1920s, he was asked what gave him the most pleasure, and he had no hesitated to reply, ‘Taking revenge upon my enemies’.¹¹

      Already in 1930 he had taken aim at Tukhachevsky, whose brilliance not only as a field commander but as an innovator was becoming more apparent. Yet Stalin’s hold on power had not achieved enough traction to take him down. Too many of the Bolshevik old guard, loyal subordinates of Lenin, were still around. He would have to bide his time to strike at the man he snidely referred to as Napoleonchik (Little Napoleon).

      THE COILS OF DECEIT

      By 1934 Stalin was ready to begin moving against his enemies. He orchestrated the assassination of Sergei Kirov, the popular head of the party apparatus in Leningrad. Kirov had been seen as the focal point of resistance to Stalin’s growing power and his ruthless exercise of it. In the voting for the CPSU’s Central Committee that same year, Kirov had received three negative votes to 292 for Stalin. That vote of support reflected his leadership to those who wanted to moderate the brutality of so much of Stalin’s industrialization campaign.¹² That Tukhachevsky had become a close friend of Kirov’s was added to Stalin’s list of damnable animosities. Another of Stalin’s enemies scheduled for destruction was Nikolai Bukharin, the author of the New Economic Policy (NEP) that introduced free enterprise in light industry, agriculture, and the retail trade which revived the war-ruined economy after the ruinous Civil War. He was the idealist of the Party and was appalled by the mass deaths caused by the collectivization of the land and by Stalin’s increasingly brutal policies, referring to his old Bolshevik comrade as Genghis Khan. He wrote the 1936 Soviet constitution that was filled with guarantees of human rights and was a strong advocate of proletarian humanism.

      Stalin never struck directly at his greatest enemies. Like a powerful snake, he would first silently wrap them in great coils of deceit and protestations of support. Only when they could not escape did he squeeze, and then it was sudden and remorseless. There was no escape. So with Tukhachevsky. He would use the marshal’s own strategic vision against him. The rise of Hitler had convinced Tukhachevsky that Nazi Germany was a mortal enemy and that a preventative war was necessary before it became too strong. Tukhachevsky, with Stalin’s tacit approval, began to sound out through military channels the armed forces of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Britain, and France on common ground to face the Nazi threat. Such tacit approval could disappear as if it had never happened leaving Tukhachevsky to face serious charges of Bonapartism. The web grew even more complex as he directed Yagoda to send agents throughout Europe to talk of a Red Army plot headed by Tukhachevsky to depose him. These then filtered back to him as official intelligence findings.

      The most bizarre result was to encourage the Germans to get in on the act through the most unlikely agent, the White émigré, General Nickolai Skoblin, living in Paris. Skoblin’s ambition was to gain control of the leading émigré organization in France and from that position manipulate the great powers to destroy the Bolshevik regime. He had already contacted Reinhard Heydrich, the number two man in Hitler’s SS, providing information that Tukhachevsky was encouraging a preventative war against the Third Reich. Skoblin added a special dollop of poison by stating that not only did Tukhachevsky have Jewish blood but also that of being a 23rd Degree Mason. The NKVD then approached him offering to help him assume leadership of the émigrés by murdering the incumbent if Skoblin would be the source of damaging information on Tukhachevsky funneled through the Czechs. They even encouraged him to keep working with the Germans as long as he passed on to the NKVD what he learned. That fitted in beautifully with Skoblin’s desire to harm the Soviets as much as possible by manipulating Stalin to destroy the leadership of the Red Army. On his next visit to Heydrich, he proposed the forging of documents proving that Tukhachevsky was a German agent. Heydrich was overjoyed and with Hitler’s enthusiastic encouragement gave full support to the plan. The coils were tightening ever so quietly around Tukhachevsky and the rest of the Red Army’s leadership as well.

      Yet Tukhachevsky remained convinced that he faced little risk. He was warned in 1936 by Corps Commander Robert Petrovich Eideman. ‘Watch out, Mikhail. You’re on shaky ground.’¹³

      ‘Watch out for what? Why shaky?’

      ‘Because the chief won’t appreciate your initiative. Don’t forget you’re vulnerable to attack and slander.’

      ‘I’m not forgetting anything; I know the whole list of my ‘crimes’. What’s more, I know he doesn’t like me. He never did. You remember the plight we were in Poland, before Warsaw in 1920? The southwest army wasn’t far way, with Yegorov, Budenny, Voroshilov, and Stalin. I asked for help. Stalin refused. I implored him. He didn’t give way. Trotsky had to threaten them with a court-martial. Five days too late they moved, but we were already in retreat.’¹⁴

      Eideman had to remind him that it was not Stalin’s dislike but his suspicion that was the danger fed by Tukhachevsky’s frequent tactless references to the incident. He seemed to shrug it off by saying he had had no real contact with Stalin and that, ‘Anyhow, I’m fully safeguarded as regards the Party and the country … I’ve not the slightest intention of fighting him. Sectarian struggles are a veritable morass anyway.’ He made a point of saying that he had not said a word when Stalin had expelled his great rival Trotsky or when he began arresting the Bolshevik old guard. In any case he said that his anti-German feelings were supported by the Commissar for Defence, Marshal Klement E. Voroshilov, who he believed was reporting everything to the Politburo. ‘There I’m safe and supported to the hilt.’ He insisted that Voroshilov and he saw eye to eye on this issue and were loyal to each other.

      Eideman commented, ‘I don’t share your confidence in Klim, a nonentity inflated by the necessity of the times.’¹⁵

      Voroshilov had indeed been keeping Stalin and the Politburo informed of Tukhachevsky’s activities. He was more sound than men gave him credit. But in Stalin’s presence, his strength of character disappeared after a certain point. Stalin had been noncommittal, but he had not squashed the efforts either. Instead he was pocketing them to use later against Tukhachevsky. He was determined not to move down the path of a preventative war against Germany. No, the Soviet Union was not ready. Instead he was looking for an accommodation that would give time for the continued build-up of the Red Army to give it a decisive edge, but that would be years away. Hitler did not plan to give him those years.

      DEAD MEN

      The plot against Tukhachevsky was in the hands of a new chief of the NKVD, Nikolai Invanovich Yezhov, described as the malignant dwarf, a man as ruthless as he was sadistic.¹⁶ Into his hands fell the manipulating of the different strands of the plot. Running parallel was the plan to decimate the upper ranks of the NKVD, the men who had risen under the tutelage of Yagoda. Had Stalin learned of the existence of his Okhrana files in the hands of the Ukrainian NKVD and the leadership of the Red Army, all his carefully arranged plots would have been tossed aside in the face of a real plot.

      That plot was now unfolding as Yakir brought others into the knowledge of the Okhrana file in early January1937. He first approached Stanislas Kosior, the First Party Secretary of the Communist Party of the Ukraine. Kosior had supervised the Holodomor and been awarded the Order of Lenin for ‘achievements in agriculture’. Although genocide in the pursuit of communism’s radiant future did not faze him, Stalin’s betrayal of the party was shocking indeed. As it was to Tukhachevsky.

      He arrived at the red brick building on Vozdviyenka Street that housed the general staff of the Red Army looking forward to seeing his old friend Yakir. Now he sat back in his chair, a look of incredulity on his face as he passed the file to Yan (Yacob) Borisovitch, Deputy Commissar of Defence and head of the Red Army’s Political Administration. Gamarnik read it and asked Yakir, ‘Is this the only copy?’

      ‘No, Yan Borisovitch, we have made a number of copies to be able to distribute them to those who can be trusted.’

      ‘That was a great mistake. You have multiplied geometrically the chances it will be betrayed. Recall all the copies immediately.’

      Yakir looked surprised, ‘You mean to bury this? I cannot believe you would …’

      Tukhachevsky stood up. All the bile he had swallowed as a good Party man came up. ‘No, one or two copies is all we need, Iona Emmanuilovich. That is all that is necessary to remove this traitor to the Party.’

      Gamarnik said, ‘Not remove but kill. There is an old saying that if you strike at a king, you must kill him. And remember this king is a Georgian. We dare not let him live, or we are all dead men.’

      ‘Easy to say but harder to do,’ Tukhachevsky added. ‘We must plan this carefully.’ The political officer could tell he was loath to commit to immediate action.

      Gamarnik said to both of them, ‘Tell no one else of this file until we are ready to commit ourselves.’¹⁷

      There matters might have stood had Balitsky not picked up hints within the NKVD of Yezhov’s reoccupation with finding damaging information on Tukhachevsky and other leaders of the Red Army. The marshal needed to know, but that was easier said than done. Balitsky knew enough of his own organization that Tukhachevsky was being watched closely by Yezhov and any direct communication with other members of the NKVD would be instantly known. He had to proceed by indirection. Shtern made his way to Moscow on innocuous business in the middle of January, to inform Yezhov that the review of Okhrana files was not yielding any information, but that Balitsky was redoubling his efforts in a proper Stakonovite spirit. He took a few days leave and made sure to find Eideman walking his daughter in the park. He paused to ask for a light and whispered as he drew in a puff, ‘Balitsky says that Yezhov is sniffing around Tukhachevsky. It can only mean his fate is sealed. He must act quickly, or he is a dead man.’ The look on Eideman’s face was priceless.

      Eideman immediately took his daughter home and rushed off to find Tukhachevsky and found him outside Moscow observing the training of the 1st Mechanized Corps. This formation and three others in the Western Soviet Union were the concrete expression of deep operations, the very first large tank and motorized formations in the world. Each corps consisted of four brigades of three tank battalions and one motorized infantry battalion and supporting arms. The corps was truly a powerful mobile, combined arms, fist. The power behind the fist, was the 13.9-ton BT7 tank with its 45mm gun. Nicknamed Betka, this tank’s mobility surpassed any other foreign design. A variant mounting a 76mm gun was just coming into the corps to provide mobile artillery support. He was there to see it perform.

      The marshal was surprised to see Eideman striding from his car to him. Before he could say anything, Eideman took him by the arm and said loud enough for those around to hear, ‘I thought I’d find you out here, Mikhail Nikolayevich. It is so good to actually get back into the real army, I couldn’t miss the chance. Training school children and civilian volunteers is important, I know, but I miss being around troops.’

      Tukhachevsky picked up on the cue, and walked towards one of the tank battalions a few hundred metres away with Eideman in tow. ‘Come, then, let’s smell hot steel and mud together. We should be in time for something hot from the mess, too.’

      Tukhachevsky did not need another warning after Eideman repeated Shtern’s words. He was now filled with the same implacable resolve that had brought him so many victories on the battlefield. Under the cover of preparing for the Plenum of the Central Committee of the Red Army to run from February into March, he arranged to have the trusted men he would need come to Moscow. They included Army Commander 1st Rank, Ieronim Petrovich Uberovich, commander of the Belorussian Military District; Corps Commander Boris Mironovich Feld’man, head of personnel of the People’s Commissariat of Defense and deputy commander of

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