I was reading Machiavelli’s Prince and he describes how it is necessary to have both the people and the army contented. If not, then either faction will revolt.
Why wasn’t this the case with Soviet Russia?
To put this in its broader context, it's worth noting that the Russian Army did try two decisive interventions in Russian politics. The first, which had a direct impact in the brutal amoral illogic behind the mass imprisonment of Soviet POWs after the war, was the Decembrist movement under Alexander I and Nicholas I. A good-sized portion of the Tsarist nobility and state leadership caste turned against Tsarism. This was the very first Russian revolution and it was broken by Tsar Nicholas in cannonfire.
The legacy of the Decembrists was a careful cultivation of a new officer corps under Tsar Nicholas that was selected for its loyalty, not its competence. This blew up in his face in the Crimean War though it muddled through all of his other wars with at least brute force, if a decreasing caliber of skill. Under Alexander II, III, and Nicholas II the officer corps reached heights of professionalism but it lagged in a great many other things. This relatively apolitical group was bequeathed to the USSR.
Ironically the major political decision of the Army in 1917 was that the Romanovs were done as a force in Russian affairs and throwing the Tsar to the wolves he stirred up. The generals in Mogilev made the last Tsar resign more than the actual revolution itself did, his vision was the one that prevailed in 1905. Mass slaughter until the blood flowed to the bridles of horses but he and his family still in power.
Stalin's Purge reflected the context of a Bolshevik hierarchy paranoid of the prospect of a military insurgency with and without the context of such a thing actually existing. The Russian Civil War saw a pattern of terror to the new model officer corps that served as its formative experience in the new Red Army, and the reality of a set of officers who owed triumphs independent not only to Stalin but the new elite rising as the old one 'retired' to Vorkuta and the Lubyanka basement or simply to a mass grave.
The Red Army inherited a tradition that seldom flexed its genuine power within the Russian state, the Bolshevik Politburo and dictators inherited a Tsarist autocratic tradition very skilled at preventing them from realizing they could use it by means fair and foul, more emphasizing the foul over the fair. Stalin did purge the old officers, but he promoted plenty of new ones, and there were cases like Marshal G.K. Zhukov who exploited the Purge to rise to power, as well as those like Konstantin K. Rokossovsky who were tortured in sometimes bestial fashion but survived with a healthy understanding of how little Stalin cared about their lives, which was no incentive to them to care about the lives of their men.
There was also a distinct pattern in who died and why. The people who had no loyalty to Stalin or had power sources independent of him were not imprisoned, they were murdered outright. The people in the specific cavalry force Stalin served with in the Civil War Tsaritsyn battle not only lived, but rose. Even a minor figure like G.K. Zhukov could and did benefit from that. So did Semyon Timoshenko. Regrettably, so did Kliment Voroshilov. Those who did not, like most of the other Marshals of the USSR not named Voroshilov, of course, were first on the 'kill with a bare ass pretense of a trial' list.
Worth noting as well is that this protection extended to after the war, when Zhukov might be sent to maintain the coast defense batteries of Samarkand but he would not be executed as a political threat, the way Tuchachevsky and Stern and others were.
It is worth noting that the singular time the Red Army did flex its muscle in this sense, it sealed the collapse of the USSR in the August Coup. With a variety of grimly amusing parallels between the collapse of Tsarism and the end of the USSR.
Sources:
https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Decembrist_Revolt
https://www.amazon.com/Nicholas-Emperor-Autocrat-All-Russias/dp/0875805485
https://www.amazon.com/Russian-Civil-War-Evan-Mawdsley/dp/1843410419
Hey there,
Just to let you know, your question is fine, and we're letting it stand. However, you should be aware that questions framed as 'Why didn't X do Y' relatively often don't get an answer that meets our standards (in our experience as moderators). There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, it often can be difficult to prove the counterfactual: historians know much more about what happened than what might have happened. Secondly, 'why didn't X do Y' questions are sometimes phrased in an ahistorical way. It's worth remembering that people in the past couldn't see into the future, and they generally didn't have all the information we now have about their situations; things that look obvious now didn't necessarily look that way at the time.
If you end up not getting a response after a day or two, consider asking a new question focusing instead on why what happened did happen (rather than why what didn't happen didn't happen) - this kind of question is more likely to get a response in our experience. Hope this helps!