The Red Army's political chief who backed the purges, then shot himself as they closed in
Every year his father came from Kiev asking for his old leather boots. Gamarnik always refused: "If working people saw those boots, they'd say: his son serves in the army and steals — where else would the old man get such boots?"
A revolutionary who led the Bolshevik underground in Civil War Ukraine and directed the industrialization of the Soviet Far East. For eight years from 1929 he built and led the Red Army's political commissar system as head of the Political Directorate, while giving political backing to Tukhachevsky's modernization of the army around mechanization and air power. He publicly supported the purge of Bukharin's 'Right Opposition' at the 1929 Central Committee plenum, but when he himself was accused in the 'military-fascist conspiracy' and dismissed in May 1937, he shot himself rather than await arrest. Rehabilitated in 1955.
Career Timeline
- 1916Joined RSDLP(b); conducted propaganda at the Kiev Arsenal factory
- 1917–1918Chairman of the Kiev Bolshevik committee; member of the Kiev Military Revolutionary Committee
- 1919–1920Chairman of Odessa Gubkom; member of the RVS, Southern Group, 12th Army
- 1920–1923Chairman of Kiev Gubernia Revkom and Executive Committee
- 1923–1928Chairman of Dalrevkom; First Secretary, Far Eastern Kraikom
- 1928–1929First Secretary, CP(b) of Belarus
- 1929–1937Head of the Red Army Political Directorate; First Deputy People's Commissar for Defense
- 1937Notified of dismissal on 30 May; shot himself the next day
Related historical events
1929, Chief of the Red Army Political Administration
Yan Gamarnik was born into a Jewish family in Zhitomir, joined the Bolsheviks in 1916, and was a characteristic figure of the generation forged by underground work and commissar service in civil-war Ukraine. After the war he was sent to the Far East, where he led the regional party organization and directed the sovietization and development of that vast frontier, and then served as first secretary of the party in Belorussia.
In 1929 he was appointed head of the Political Administration of the Red Army (PUR), and from the following year also first deputy people's commissar of defense and deputy chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council. The Political Administration ran the army's party organizations, political education, and cadre policy, and for eight years Gamarnik managed the joining of political work and military professionalism. Together with Tukhachevsky, Uborevich, and Yakir he underpinned the modernization of the army built around mechanization, aviation, and officer training, and drawing on his Far Eastern experience he was deeply involved in strengthening the Special Far Eastern Army and in Far Eastern development.
The Red Army of the mid-1930s was among the most rapidly modernizing armies in the world, and Gamarnik managed its political backbone. That very position, the hinge between army and party, would place him in the most dangerous spot of all when suspicion of the high command exploded in 1937.
May 31, 1937: the Last Morning
At the end of May 1937 the Tukhachevsky case was swallowing the army's high command. Tukhachevsky, Yakir, and Uborevich were arrested one after another, and the ground under Gamarnik, who had worked with them for years, narrowed by the day. On May 30 he was dismissed as deputy people's commissar of defense. On the morning of May 31, army officials came to the apartment where he lay ill and informed him of his removal from the Military Council. Shortly after they left, Gamarnik shot himself. It was the road he chose instead of arrest, interrogation, and a fabricated confession.
The next day Pravda reported that he had "become entangled with anti-Soviet elements" and destroyed himself. On June 11 Tukhachevsky and seven commanders were sentenced to death by a closed military tribunal and executed, and Gamarnik was posthumously branded a member of the "military-fascist plot". The repression reached his family: his wife Blyuma was shot in 1938, and his young daughter passed through orphanages and the camps.
Gamarnik was rehabilitated in 1955. Archive-based research has concluded that the entire "military-fascist plot" was a fabrication built on confessions extracted under torture, and that no real conspiracy existed. The losses the purge inflicted on the Red Army's command and political cadre were paid for cruelly in the catastrophe of 1941, and Gamarnik's last morning stands recorded as the opening scene of that loss.