Stalin on the Purge M. Stalin's account of the execution
of the eight generals in Moscow, published in the News Chronicle this week, may well be questioned ; but it at least has the merit, which other explanations have conspicuously lacked, of explaining. Stalin denies that the generals had " sold " their country by betraying military secrets ; their crime, as has always seemed probable, consisted in disagreement with official policy. They wished to break Russia's alliances with bourgeois governments, to end the policy of support of the League of Nations,. to involve the capitalist countries in internecine war, and, when they were exhausted and the peoples of the world were in revolt, to set the Red Army on the march. Such a policy might indeed appeal to Tukhachevsky ; perhaps he envisaged another decisive, and this time successful, battle, under the walls of Warsaw..4 The explanation may not be true ; but it is at least good sense. And since the result of such a policy would be, not a war of capitalist powers, but an attack on Russia, it gives Stalin the right to say that the generals were endangering the safety of the Soviet Union. But does support of a misguided policy justify execution ? The answer to that, no doubt, is simply that Russia is Russia.
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