00:00Shortly before his arrest, Tukhachevsky was relieved of his duties as deputy to Marshal Voroshilov
00:06and appointed military commander of the Volga Military District.
00:10Not long after assuming his new position, he was secretly arrested in May 1937
00:15and transported back to Moscow in a prison van.
00:20Tukhachevsky's interrogation and torture were directly overseen by Nikolai Yezhov,
00:25the chief of the NKVD, the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs,
00:29which functioned as both the Interior Ministry and Secret Police of the Soviet Union.
00:35After days of brutal torture, a broken Tukhachevsky confessed, claiming that he was a German agent,
00:42collaborating with the old Bolshevik and Stalin's critic Nikolai Bukharin to seize power.
00:48His confession, which is preserved in the archives, was found to be stained with blood,
00:53likely sprayed from his moving body during the interrogation.
00:57Discover the full story on worldhistory.tv
