Hello James
The higher echelons of the Red Army were purged during the Great Purge of 1936-39, so i imagine any senior officers who had been officers in the Imperial army would have got a bullet in the back of the head at that time. I haven't done any kind of systematic search, but few WW2 Red Army Generals had even served in the ranks of the Imperial army. It happens that I recently prepared some materials for students which included some figures for the Great Purge, which I reproduce below.
In 1937-38, there was a systematic sweep-up of former kulaks and other anti-Soviet elements, including Orthodox clergy, worshippers and former Tsarist officers, of whom 669,929 were arrested and 376,202 executed. From 1937, continuing into 1940, there was a further NKVD ‘operation’ against Poles, leading to 143,810 arrests and 111,091 executions. The total number executed during the Great Purge is disputed, but declassified Soviet archives record that the NKVD detained 1,548,366 persons in 1937-38, of whom 681,692 were shot. In the same period Stalin personally signed orders for 40,000 executions, of which 90% were carried out. While reviewing one such list, Stalin reportedly muttered to no one in particular: "Who's going to remember all this riff-raff in ten or twenty years’ time? No one. Who remembers the names now of the boyars Ivan the Terrible got rid of? No one." (quoted in Dimitri Volkogonov: Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, New York 1991, p.210).
Alexander Solzhenitsyn got eight years in the Gulag for making some critical comments about Red Army commanders in a letter home in 1944.
Ann
