“Is there no section of the Soviet organization free from traitors and wreckers? Or is Stalin suffering from a prolonged attack of jitters?” These were the top questions of the New York Times editorial board on June 12, 1937, the day that Mikhail N. Tukhachevskii and seven other high ranking Red Army commanders were shot. The confusion at the Times was widely shared. What did Stalin think he was doing when ordering the arrest and execution of his high command? What was the impact of the military purge upon the future performance of the Red Army? What role, if any, did the assault upon the military play in the course of the Great Terror itself?

Peter Whitewood’s book is a successful attempt to answer many of these questions. In the true fashion of a historian, Whitewood believes that context is crucial for developing reasonable explanations. He begins his story in the period of the Civil War, where the roots of the purge lay. Other historians have hearkened back to the Civil War period when discussing the military terror, but usually to show that the personal animosity between Tukhachevskii and Stalin had festered for decades before Stalin chose his moment to strike. Whitewood has other, more convincing reasons for returning to the Civil War. It was in this period, he argues, that the main issues that would come to the fore in 1937 first emerged. The tension between revolutionary enthusiasts and “military specialists” trained under the Old Regime flared up into open contest, with the political police sharing the enthusiasts’ undying suspicion of former officers and the army looking to avoid public controversy over the devouring of its leadership. This tension coincided both with the existential crisis occasioned by a narrowly-won military clash and with the justified fear of the open and clandestine intervention of foreign powers looking to smother the communist experiment in its cradle.

Whitewood does a very effective job not only of demonstrating the importance of this foundational constellation of fears and forces, but also of tracing the development of these relationships over the course of the 1920s and 1930s. In this account, the struggle to prevent treason was an ongoing affair. Even in peacetime, the political police continued their harassment of vulnerable military specialists and accused the army leadership of complacency, not just in regard to foreign espionage but also in regard to membership in the “opposition.”

In this light, the arrest of Tukhachevskii’s group on suspicion of leading a cabal both Trotskyist and fascist seems not incoherently paranoid, but almost overdetermined. One of the more interesting questions might therefore be not why the terror campaign against the military leadership was launched in 1937 but why the hammer had not fallen earlier. Whitewood has a surprising answer to this question: Stalin. Even at the very end, he argues, the fact that the doomed generals were demoted nearly two weeks before they were arrested suggests that there was some restraining force at play. With the top Stalinists in the Red Army (K. E. Voroshilov and S. M. Budennyi) already on board with the purge strategy and NKVD chief N. I. Ezhov insistently ringing alarm bells, who else could have slowed the process down? Who else indeed.

On this point, as on several others, Whitewood is in the realm of informed speculation. The most revealing archival documents Whitewood deploys are the ones showing the persistence of Civil War conflicts in the bureaucratic struggles of the 1920s and 1930s. There are no smoking guns showing exactly why the final decision was made to arrest the army leadership, and we should not expect them. Or rather, Whitewood argues that we ought to take seriously the language of the terror documents we already have. Yezhov pursued the commanders and Stalin authorized their execution because both believed that there really was a military conspiracy sponsored by domestic and foreign enemies. He thus aligns himself with scholars who argue for a reactive model in which Stalin ordered the terror out of panic rather than Machiavellian calculation. One might have wished, though, for a bit more engagement with the rest of the recent literature on the Great Terror to flesh this out more. One wonders, say, whether Whitewood’s reactive and fearful Stalin fits into or complicates Timothy Snyder’s argument that Poles were disproportionately targeted in the Terror. These, presumably, are directions that future scholars can pursue, and they will be glad to have this volume as a resource when they do so.