Airplanes in the 1930s were not particularly known for their safety, but I get your point.
I’d just edit it personally to just say that Tukhachevsky and Triandafilov survived their untimely deaths or something like that.
I don't see why Tukhachevsky in particular surviving changes much, and I think it's really hard
to make him survive. Even from the earliest days of the revolution, Tukhachevsky was noted as being not particularly favorable of it, and sources from both inside the Soviet government and from independent accounts before and after the revolution (notably during his arrest) paint the picture of a nationalist strongman, not a dedicated defender of the revolution: he anecdotally prayed to Perun when imprisoned, and less anecdotally had a history of flirting with right-wing nationalist political movements before and in the earlier days of the revolution: he believed Slavs were of a purer race than the rest of Europe, and when he shared a cell with Charles de Gaulle in WW1 de Gaulle later wrote in his diary that Tukhachevsky was a raving anti-Semite that blamed Jews for bringing Christianity and Marxism to Russia. It's very unlikely that he survives the purges, no matter who's put in charge of them; Yezhov, Yagoda, Beria, Kirov, Sverdlov, what-have-you. According to Remy Roure, he asked Tukhachevsky if he was a socialist and Tukhachevsky replied:
Socialist? Certainly not! What a need for classification you have! Besides, the great socialists are Jews and the socialist doctrine is a branch of universal christianity. I laugh at money, and whether the land is divided up or not is all one to me. The barbarians, my ancestors, lived in common, but they had chiefs. No, I detest socialists, Jews and Christians.
Even putting aside my biases, looking at his confession and his personal politics (as well as his active rivalry with members of the general staff like Voroshilov and his hatred of Stalin's economic policy---he
hated balanced economics, and wanted to focus on military industrialism as much as possible) leads me to believe he was undeniably part of the conspiracy to overthrow the government: which did provably exist, as proven by letters between Trotsky and his son in 1937. I find it incredibly unlikely that Tukhachevsky survives the purges. His confession was almost the length of a full novel! It's hard to beat something that extensive out of somebody.
Even if he does survive, by time time WW2 rolls around Zhukov is largely everything Tukhachevsky is but better. Tukhachevsky's performance as a general was middling at best, and his overextension at the Kherzon line during the Polish-Soviet war led to one of the largest strategic failures for the Bolsheviks during the Civil War. I think the biggest blame for the USSR's poor performance goes to Marshal Grigory Kulik, who dismissed innovations in tanks and artillery and led the Red Army to unmitigated embarrassments in the Winter War and early days of WW2. This went as far as intentionally sabotaging and delaying the production of KV-1 and T-34 tanks, leading to only 12% having reliable ammunition in 1941: the vast majority had to be abandoned when they ran out of ammo. He also hated minefields, hated automatic small arms (he famously refused to give his troops PPsH-41 submachine guns), and ultimately ended his military career by letting Leningrad be encircled and put under siege.
You don't need an doctrinal change: you need an organizational change of the Red Army much sooner than the war's beginning. One of the biggest problems the Red Army had during the Winter War and in the early days of WW2 is that political commissars could exercise operational authority. You'd have to significantly limit the influence of commissars in the Red Army: perhaps limiting them solely to roles of oversight and ideological correctness, removing their operational authority.
