From Stalin's personal secretary to the Red Army's purge enforcer, nicknamed 'the Inquisitor of the Red Army'
According to former USSR Health Minister Ye. I. Smirnov, when he proposed to Stalin in 1949 that Mekhlis head a government commission, Stalin burst out laughing, wiping away tears, saying words to the effect that Mekhlis was suited to destroying and wrecking things, not to constructive work.
Born in Odessa into a Jewish family, he worked as a clerk and tutor before joining the Zionist workers' party Poale Zion (1907–1910). He entered the Communist Party in 1918 and did Red Army political work; in 1922–1926 he was in effect Stalin's personal secretary. As Pravda editor-in-chief from 1930 to November 1937 he incited the campaign against 'enemies of the people'. From December 1937 to September 1940, as Deputy People's Commissar of Defence and head of the Main Political Directorate, he helped organise the mass purge of the officer corps. His interference on the Crimean Front contributed to the Kerch catastrophe of 1942 and he was demoted two ranks, but his ranks were later restored and he became a colonel-general (1944). He served as USSR Minister of State Control (1946–1950) and died of heart disease in 1953.
Activities and affiliations
- 1918–1920 Military command · Soviet Union · Military and defence
Career Timeline
- 1911–1917Tsarist artillery service, senior NCO on the Romanian Front
- 1918–1920Red Army political commissar at brigade, division and group levels
- 1922–1926Assistant secretary and bureau chief in the CC secretariat — Stalin's de facto personal secretary
- 1930–1937CC Press Department head and Pravda editor-in-chief, directing the purge propaganda campaign
- 1937–1940Deputy Commissar of Defence and head of the Red Army Political Directorate, chief organiser of the military purge
- 1942Stavka representative on the Crimean Front; the Kerch disaster led to front collapse, and Stalin's order demoted him two ranks
- 1942–1945Military Council member on multiple fronts; ranks restored (lieutenant-general 1942, colonel-general 1944)
- 1946–1950USSR Minister of State Control and chairman of the State Staff Commission, member of the Council of Ministers Presidium
Related historical events
- 1914–1918First World WarTsarist artillery NCO on the Romanian FrontHe served in the Tsarist artillery from 1911 to 1917, reaching senior NCO rank on the Romanian Front.
- 1918–1922The Civil War and Foreign InterventionPolitical commissar in the Red Army
- 1937–1938The Great Purgeled army purges as head of the Red Army Political Directorate
- 1938–1941The Soviet-Japanese Border Wars and the Neutrality PactDeputy Commissar of Defence, head of the Red Army Political Directorate, dispatched to KhasanDispatched to the Far East alongside Frinovsky to monitor Blyukher. On 3 August he reported to Moscow that Blyukher was incapable of command, triggering Blyukher's removal.
- 1939.11–1940.03The Winter WarHead of the army political directorate, hunting for blame at the frontAs head of the political directorate he went to the front to fix blame for defeat; the execution of the encircled 44th Division's commanders shows the method.
- 1941–1945The Great Patriotic WarArmy political chiefStalin’s deputy who led the political directorate of the Red Army.
The Red Army Purge and Political Control (1930–1941)
From 1930 to November 1937 Mekhlis headed the Central Committee Press Department and edited Pravda. Day after day the paper carried material demanding an intensified struggle against "enemies of the people", exposed alleged conspiracies against Soviet power and inflamed spy mania. In 1935–1936 he provided the propaganda coverage of the Zinoviev–Kamenev trials and repeatedly called for the execution of all the defendants.
From 30 December 1937 to 6 September 1940 he was Deputy People's Commissar of Defence and head of the Red Army's Main Political Directorate. He is recorded as one of the organisers of the mass repressions in the Red Army. English Wikipedia states that he supervised a purge of at least 20,000 of the 30,000 political commissars attached to the army, and Yad Vashem gives the same figures.
In May 1938 he travelled to Khabarovsk with the deputy head of the NKVD, Mikhail Frinovsky, to supervise the purge of the Far Eastern Army. Its commander, Vasily Blyukher, was arrested and beaten to death. Mekhlis telegraphed Stalin boasting that he had dismissed all 215 political workers, most of them arrested.
During the 1939–1940 war with Finland he was sent to the front to report to Stalin on why the Red Army was being beaten back. He attributed the setbacks to treachery and had the commander Alexei Vinogradov, his chief of staff and the chief of the political department tried and shot in front of the troops. In September 1941, on his order, the artillery commander of the 34th Army, Vasily Goncharov, was shot in front of army headquarters; according to English Wikipedia, Goncharov was posthumously exonerated only in 2002.
Yad Vashem states that Mekhlis fabricated charges against the local commanders on each front to which he was assigned, and that on his initiative the generals D. Pavlov, V. Klimovskikh, A. Grigoryev, A. Korobkov, N. Klych, K. Kachanov and others were tortured, sentenced to death and executed. This is a documented account of repression that should be preserved without sanitising.
Contemporaries assessed him in conflicting terms. Khrushchev recalled him as "an honest man but somewhat mad", seeing enemies and wreckers everywhere; admiral Isakov described him as nervous, overwrought and fanatical rather than brave; Meretskov wrote that he was honest and brave but suspicious and very rude. Simonov, who witnessed Kerch, argued that he bore the main responsibility for the Kerch disaster and was "military illiterate", yet was of irreproachable personal courage and did not act for personal glory. His later wartime career and his post-war tenure as Minister of State Control are covered in the biography.
The Kerch Disaster (1942)
On 20 January 1942, Mekhlis arrived at Kerch as the Stavka (Supreme High Command) representative. Within two days he cabled Stalin denouncing Crimean Front commander General Kozlov as 'a bewildered and unconfident leader,' and proceeded to flood Moscow with hostile reports on nearly every senior officer. He reshuffled the command at will, replacing chief of staff Tolbukhin (a future Marshal) with his own man, Major-General Vechny.
Yet Mekhlis himself contributed nothing tangible to reorganising the front. For two months he fixated on offensive preparations while refusing to transition to a defensive posture, and squandered air power on secondary targets instead of interdicting enemy armour and troop concentrations. On 9 May, Stalin cabled: 'You are not a bystander on the Crimean Front. You are the responsible Stavka representative, answerable for all successes and failures. If "the whole situation indicated the enemy would attack in the morning," why did you confine yourself to passive criticism instead of organising resistance?'
When Manstein's 11th Army struck on 8 May, the Crimean Front collapsed within days. The Red Army lost over a third of its roughly 170,000 troops and was driven from the Kerch Peninsula entirely. On 4 June 1942, Stalin demoted Mekhlis two ranks to Corps Commissar and dismissed him as Deputy Defence Commissar and head of the Political Directorate. The cipher telegrams Mekhlis wrote in his own distinctive hand recorded everyone else's failures. But never once his own.