Red Army Marshall Mikhail Nikolaevich Tukhachevsky, along with seven other high-ranking military officers, is arrested and charged with overseeing the creation of a “right-wing Trotskyite” conspiracy and undertaking espionage for Nazi Germany. The accused are brutally beaten by NKVD officials before signing confessions in which they admit to having committed the imaginary crimes. During the process, they implicate still other leading officers and military officials who will, in turn, be arrested and interrogated. Following the conclusion of a perfunctory one-day secret trial the eight accused are executed.
In the wake of the secret proceedings, a full-blown purge of the Soviet military ensues with the aim of aimed of rooting out additional “fascists hirelings.” By the time that the “investigations” run their course, the Red Army’s command structure is decimated. The purge eliminates fifteen of sixteen army commanders; sixty out of sixty-seven corps commanders; and 136 of 199 divisional commanders. Although not all lose their lives to the NKVD’s executioners, as many as 23,000 additional lower-level officers are removed from their posts. The resulting damage to the USSR’s war readiness is immense.