Marshal of the Soviet Union Vasily Blyukher

Vasily Konstantinovich Blyukher (also spelled Blücher, Blukher, Bliukher etc, Russian: Василий Константинович Блюхер) (November 19 1889 - November 9, 1938), Soviet military commander, was among the prominent victims of Stalin's Great Purge of the late 1930s.

Blyukher was born into a peasant family near Yaroslavl, north-east of Moscow. Despite his German surname, he was not of German descent as is sometimes written: the name was given to his family by a 19th century landlord after a famous Prussian Marshal Blücher. He joined the army of the Russian Empire in 1914 and served as a non-commissioned officer. In 1916 he joined the Bolshevik Party, and took part in the Russian Revolution in Samara.

Blyukher joined the Red Army in 1918 and was soon a commander. During the Russian Civil War he was one of the outstanding figures on the Bolshevik side. The 10,000-strong South Urals Partisan Army under Blyukher's command marched 1,500km in 40 days of continuous fighting to attack the White forces from the rear, then join with regular Red Army units. He was the first recipient of the Order of the Red Banner, his citation saying: "The raid made by Comrade Blyukher's forces under impossible conditions can only be equated with Suvorov's crossings in Switzerland."

From 1924 to 1927 Blyukher was a Soviet military adviser in China, where he used the name Galen while attached to Chiang Kai-Shek's military headquarters. Among those he instructed was Lin Biao, later a leading figure in the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army. On his return he was given command of the Ukraine military region, and then in 1929 he was transferred to the vitally important military command in the Soviet Far East, known as the Special Red Banner Eastern Army (OKDVA). In 1935 he was made a Marshal of the Soviet Union.

Based at Khabarovsk, Blyukher exercised a degree of autonomy in the Far East unusual for a Soviet military commander. With Japan steadily extending its grip on China and hostile to the Soviet Union, the Far East was an active military command. In July and August 1938 Blukher commanded Soviet forces in action, defeating the Japanese at the Battle of Khasan Lake, on the border between the Soviet Union and Japanese-occupied Korea.

The importance of the Far East Front gave Blyukher a certain degree of immunity from Stalin's purge of Red Army command, which had begun in 1937 with the execution of Mikhail Tukhachevsky. But in October 1938 he was recalled to Moscow and arrested. A contributory factor in Blyukher's downfall was the defection to Japan in June of the NKVD chief in the Far East, Genrikh Lyushkov, who feared arrest.

In prison Blyukher refused to confess and was never formally tried. He was severely beaten and it is believed he died in prison. He was formally "rehabilitated" by Nikita Khrushchev in 1957.