- This article is designated a work in progress. Please ask the wiki team before adding content.
- One or more subjects within this article are under rework, and may no longer be accurate.
Mikhail Tukhachevsky is a Bolshevik military theorist, a veteran of both the Weltkrieg and the Russian Civil War and, since the defeat of the Soviet forces in the early 1920s, an exiled Russian Bolshevik in service of the Commune of France, currently on a military expedition in Patagonia together with fellow Bolsheviks Ioseb Dzhugashvili, Georgy Zhukov and Vasily Chuikov.
Biography[]
Early Life[]
Tukhachevsky was born at Alexandrovskoye into an ethnic Russian family of impoverished hereditary nobles. His great-grandfather Alexander Tukhachevsky (1793–1831) had served as a colonel in the Imperial Russian Army and had died in the Battle of Warsaw during the November Uprising of 1830/31. He spent his childhood in Vrazhskoye and Penza to the north of Saratov.
Between 1904 and 1909, Tukhachevsky went to school in Penza and enrolled at the Cadet Corps in the aftermath. After graduating in 1912, he entered Alexander Military Law Academy, from which he graduated in 1914 with top three marks. At the end of his studies, he chose to serve in the Semyonovsky Lifeguard Regiment and after obtaining the approval of the regiment's officers, Guard Lieutenant Tukhachevsky was appointed junior officer in July 1914, just at the beginning of the Weltkrieg.
Military Career[]
During the war, Tukhachevsky fought on the Russian Western Front against the Austrians and the Germans in Poland and the Baltics. He was wounded multiple times and was awarded several high ranking military decorations. In early 1915, Tukhachevsky was captured near Lomza after his company had been surrounded and almost destroyed it completely. He was taken prisoner and sent to an internment camp in Ingolstadt, Bavaria.
At Ingolstadt Fortress, he shared a cell with the young captain Charles de Gaulle, who had been captured at Verdun. Tukhachevsky spent mich of his time playing his violin and spouted nihilist beliefs; Fellow inmates later reported that Tukhachevsky was perceived as a convinced antisemite (as jews had brought "Christianity and the morality of capital" to Russia) with neo-paganist features and as an admirer of Napoleon.
In September 1917, he made his fifth escape attempt, this time successfully, and managed to cross the border into Switzerland on September 18. In October 1917 he returned to Russia via France, England, Norway and Sweden and re-enlisted in the Semyonovsky Regiment as a company commander.
During the Civil War[]
In the direct aftermath of the October Revolution, Tukhachevsky was not a convinced Bolshevik (even though he tends to state that till this day) and had a comparably passive stance towards the new regime. He did not join the Communist Party when most other military officers did (instead, he would only join the party in late spring of 1918), but volunteered for the Red Army in March 1918: He worked in the military department of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and was appointed military commissar of the Moscow defense area.
In early 1919, Leon Trotsky appointed Tukhachevsky as commander of the 5th Army near Samara, succeeding Žanis Blumbergs; Tukhachevsky would be one of the main military leaders of the Red counteroffensive along the Ural river in mid-1919 - which would eventually evolve into a debacle for the Red leadership and severely strengthened the White movement in the long-term.
WORK IN PROGRESS. THE REST OF TUKHACHEVSKY'S INVOLVEMENT IN THE CIVIL WAR IS TBA ONCE THE RUSSIA REWORK IS REVEALED
Post-Civil War[]
WIP