In 1937, Kulik was appointed chief of the Main Artillery Directorate, making him responsible for overseeing the development and production of new
tanks,
tank guns and artillery pieces. Kulik retained his opinions of the Red Army as it was during 1918, the last time he had had a field command. He denounced Marshal
Mikhail Tukhachevsky's campaign to redevelop the Red Army's mechanized forces into independent units like the
Wehrmacht's
Panzerkorps; the creation of separate divisions allowed them to use their greater maneuverability for
Deep Battle-style
maneuver warfare, rapidly exploiting breakthroughs rather than simply assisting the infantry. Correctly sensing that Stalin considered these new ideas as potential threats to his authority, Kulik successfully argued against the change. In an anonymous section of a report on the
Spanish Civil War, Kulik noted that tanks not facing anti-tank weaponry were effective on the battlefield. He and Voroshilov argued that Tukhachevsky's theoretical style of warfare could not yet be carried out by the Red Army in its pre-war state, even if those theories were effective. Though Tukhachevsky was
purged in 1937 because of Stalin and Voroshilov's dislike for him, his theories were at that time already widely influential in the Red Army. Though Kulik and Voroshilov's reforms moved the Red Army further away from deep operations doctrine, which had fallen out of favor due to many of its proponents being purged, as well as a lack of officers able to carry out the complicated operations required, the adjustment of Soviet military theory to better reflect the Red Army's actual operational capability would have a positive impact on the performance of the army in the opening days of World War II. Marshal
Georgi Zhukov's use of deep operations techniques to great effect in
Manchuria against the Japanese would eventually convince Stalin of their value, after which they were used effectively during
Operation Bagration. Kulik criticized Marshal Voroshilov's endorsement of the production of the
T-34 tank and his namesake
KV-1 tanks, both of which would prove instrumental to the survival of the USSR. After Kulik was overruled by Stalin and ordered to produce the tanks anyway, he began deliberately delaying the production of ammunition and guns, resulting in a drastic shortage of 76.2mm shells. At the start of the war, no more than 12% of T-34 and KV-1 tanks had a full ammunition load; few had any anti-tank rounds, most had no more than a few
high explosive shells, and a shocking number had to rely solely on their coaxial machine guns, having no 76.2mm rounds at all. Many T-34 and KV-1 tanks were sent into battle underarmed and eventually had to be abandoned by their crews when they ran out of ammunition. Prior to and during the early period of the war with Germany, Kulik interfered with the armament of the T-34 and KV-1 tanks. Though it was both more effective and cheaper than the
L-11 gun then in use, Kulik opposed the adoption of the
F-34 gun designed by
Vasiliy Grabin's workshop at the
Joseph Stalin Factory No. 92, as he was a political patron for the
Leningrad Kirov Plant, which manufactured the L-11. Due to his status, the relevant armament bureaucrats failed to approve the newer gun for fear of retaliation. This eventually necessitated a rushed retrofit of the KV-1 and T-34's gun in the midst of the German invasion when it became apparent that the L-11 could not reliably penetrate even the lightly armored
Panzer III, which was arriving in large numbers. This was facilitated by Grabin's disobedience; with the endorsement of Kulik's political enemies, he had secretly ordered the manufacture of a reserve stock of F-34 guns, predicting that they would soon be needed and that his decision would be lauded by Stalin once the gun had proven itself in battle. Grabin was correct; Kulik's objections were outweighed by the many letters from Soviet tank crewmen to Stalin endorsing the new gun. Kulik also disparaged the use of
minefields as a defensive measure, considering this to be at odds with a properly aggressive strategy and terming minefields "a weapon of the weak." This decision allowed for the essentially free movement of German forces across Russian defensive lines during
Operation Barbarossa, with static defensive strongpoints being bypassed easily by Panzer spearheads and were surrounded by infantry, forcing the defenders to surrender. He also zealously endorsed Stalin's exhortations against retreat, allowing whole divisions to be encircled and annihilated or starved into surrendering
en masse. Eventually, after Kulik's demotion, the laying of multiple layers of anti-tank mines proved instrumental for both the successful defense of Leningrad during
the German siege and the successful defensive actions against much stronger German armored forces at the
Battle of Kursk. Kulik similarly scorned the German issue of the
MP-40 submachine gun to their shock troops, stating that it encouraged inaccuracy and excessive ammunition consumption among the rank and file. He forbade the issue of the submachine gun
PPD-40 to his units, stating that it was only suitable as a police weapon. It was not until 1941, after widespread demand for a weapon to match the MP-40 again overruled Kulik's restrictions, that a simple modification of the manufacturing process for the PPD-40 produced the
PPSh-41, which proved to be amongst the most widely produced, inexpensive and effective small arms of the war, considered by many German infantrymen to be superior to the MP-40, with whole companies of Russian infantrymen eventually being issued the weapon for
house-to-house fighting. Kulik refused to endorse the production of the innovative
Katyusha rocket artillery system, stating "What the hell do we need rocket artillery for? The main thing is the horse-drawn gun." Although it could have been produced much earlier in the war without his meddling, the Katyusha rocket artillery system eventually proved to be one of the most effective Soviet inventions of the war and a major advance in artillery technology. In 1939 he became Deputy People's Commissar of Defense, also participating with the Soviet occupation of Eastern
Poland in September. He commanded the Soviet's artillery attack on Finland at the start of the
Winter War, which quickly foundered. On 5 May 1940, Kulik's wife Kira Kulik-Simonich was kidnapped on Stalin's orders, unknown to Kulik and for an uncertain reason. Kira, a mother to an eight-year old girl, was subsequently executed by
NKVD executioner
Vasili Blokhin in June 1940. It appears that Stalin then ordered the modern equivalent of a
damnatio memoriae against the hapless woman; although she was described as very pretty, no photographs or other images of her survive. Two days later, on 7 May 1940, Kulik was promoted to
Marshal of the Soviet Union. Although the public search for Kira continued for 12 years, he soon married again. Years after his appointment as Chief of Artillery (and his poor performance in two separate wars),
Nikita Khrushchev questioned his competence, causing Stalin to rebuke him angrily: "You don't even know Kulik! I know him from the civil war when he commanded the artillery in Tsaritsyn. He knows artillery!" ==World War II==