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Iona Yakir (August 3, 1896 – June 12, 1937) was a Red Army commander and one of the world’s major military reformers between World War I and World War II. He was an early and major military victim of the Great Purge, alongside Mikhail Tukhachevsky. Born in Kishinev, Bessarabia, Russian Empire, into the prosperous family of a Jewish pharmacist, Yakir graduated from the local secondary school in 1914. Because of Imperial Russian governmental restrictions on Jews’ access to higher education, Yakir studied abroad at the University of Basel in Switzerland, in the field of chemistry.
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