Top secret.

Comrade Voroshilov,

I received both documents -- Comrade Tukhachevsky's explanatory memorandum and the General Staff's "considerations." You know that I greatly respect Comrade Tukhachevsky as an extraordinarily capable comrade. But I did not expect that a Marxist, who should not lose touch with reality, could advocate such a fantastical "plan," completely divorced from reality. His "plan" lacks the main thing, namely, an accounting of the real possibilities of an economic, financial, and cultural nature. This "plan" fundamentally disrupts every conceivable and permissible proportion between the army as a part of the country and the country as a whole, with its economic and cultural limits. The "plan" slides into the viewpoint of "purely military" people, who frequently forget that the army is a derivative of the country's economic and cultural condition.

How could such a "plan" have arisen in the mind of a Marxist who has been through the school of the civil war?

I think that Tukhachevsky's "plan" is the result of a fashionable infatuation with "left" phraseology, the result of an infatuation with paper-based, bureaucratic maximalism. That is why analysis has been replaced in it by "playing with numbers," and a Marxist perspective on the growth of the Red Army has been replaced by fantasy.

To "implement" such a "plan" would mean certainly ruining both the country's economy and the army. This would be worse than any counter-revolution.

It is gratifying that the Staff of the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, despite the danger of temptation, clearly and definitively distanced itself from Comrade Tukhachevsky's "plan."

March 23, 1930

Yours,

I. Stalin.

Source: Istoricheskiy arkhiv. 1998. No. 5-6. Pp. 150-151.

RGASPI. F. 74. Op. 2. D. 38. L. 58.