← Back to the front page

A Surgeon With 300% Mortality Rate From a Single Operation and Other Historic Screwups

Khalid Elhassan October 11, 2020 32 min

Robert Liston - Surgery — Dr. Robert Liston operating. Wellcome Images

29. Few Mistakes Were Greater Than Stalin’s Military Purge

The first five Marshals of the Soviet Union in November 1935, l-r Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Semyon Budyonny, Kliment Voroshilov, Vasily Blyukher, Aleksandr Yegorov. Only Voroshilov and Budyonny survived Stalin’s Military Purge. WeapoNews

In addition to wreaking havoc on the Red Army’s higher ranks, Stalin’s Military Purge also decimated the best middle-rank officers. Until 1937, the Soviet military had a reputation for being innovative. There was an intellectual ferment within the Red Army, such as with the Soviet military’s Theory of Deep Operations, which was as creative as anything Germany’s Wehrmacht was doing at the time.

The Soviets had their equivalents of brilliant German officers such as the Guderians and Mannsteins, brimming with ideas for revolutionizing warfare. They suffered the most, because the purge fell heaviest on the creative and free-thinking. Such officers stood out, and so were prime suspects of harboring the deviationist tendencies Stalin wanted to be stamped out. Thus, when Hitler attacked, the Soviet military was poorly officered and poorly led.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.