Mikhail Tukhachevsky (Nazi Cold War)

Mikhail Nikolaevich Tukhachevsky (Михаи́л Никола́евич Тухаче́вский) was a general in the Red Army.

Early Years
Tukhachevsky was born at Alexandrovskoye, Safonovsky District, into a family of impoverished hereditary nobles.[2] There was a legend that his family was descended from a Flemish count who ended up stranded in the East during the Crusadesand took a Turkish wife before settling in Russia. His great-grandfather was Alexander Tukhachevsky, a Colonel of Imperial Russian Army. He was of Russian ethnicity. After attending the Moscow Military School in 1912, he moved on to the Aleksandrovskoye Military School whence he graduated in 1914. At the outset of the First World War, he joined theSemyenovsky Guards Regiment as a Second Lieutenant declaring,

After being taken prisoner by the Imperial German Army in February 1915, Tukhachevsky escaped four times from prisoner-of-war camps and was finally held as an incorrigible escapee in Ingolstadt fortress. There he shared a cell with Charles de Gaulle who reported that he played his violin, spouted nihilist beliefs and spoke against Jews whom he called dogs who "spread their fleas throughout the world".

His fifth escape was successful, and after crossing the Swiss-German border, he returned to Russia in September 1917. After the October Revolution, Tukhachevsky joined theBolsheviks and went on to play a key role in the Red Army in spite of his noble ancestry.