Mikhail Vassilyvich Frunze (Russian Михаил Васильевич Фрунзе) (1885 – 31 October 1925) was a Bolshevik leader during and just prior to the Russian Revolution.

Frunze was born in Bishkek, then a small Russian garrison town in the Kyrgyz part of Turkestan, the son of a peasant. At the Second Congress of the Social Democratic Party in London in 1903, there was an ideological split between Vladimir Lenin and Julius Martov, two main party leaders. Martov argued for a large party of activists, whilst Lenin wanted a small group of professional revolutionaries with a large fringe group of sympathisers . Martov won, 28-23 and Lenin stormed out, forming his own faction known as the Bolsheviks (Russian: majority), which Frunze joined. Those who supported Martov were called Mensheviks (Russian: minority).

Two years after the Second Congress, Frunze was an important leader in the 1905 Revolution, at the head of striking textile workers. Following the disastrous defeat of the revolution at the hands of the Tsar, Frunze was arrested and sentenced to death, but he was later reprieved and his sentence was commuted to life at hard labour .

After ten years in the camps in Siberia, Frunze escaped to Chita, where he became editor of the Bolshevik weekly newspaper called Vostochnoe Obozrenie.

During the February Revolution, an early stage of the 1917 Revolution, Frunze was head of the Minsk civilian militia before being elected president of the Byelorussian Soviet. He later went to Moscow and led an armed force of workers to aid in the struggle for control of the city.

In 1918 Frunze became Military Commissar for the Voznesensk Province. During the early days of the Russian Civil War, Frunze was appointed as head of the Southern Army Group. After defeating Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak and the White Army in Omsk, Leon Trotsky (the head of the Red Army) gave total command of the Eastern Front to him. Frunze went on to rid his native Turkestan of White troops.

In November 1920, Frunze retook the Crimea and managed to push General Pyotr Wrangel and his troops out of Russia. He was also instrumental in the destruction of Nestor Makhno's anarchist movement in the Ukraine after Makhno refused to merge with the Red Army.

In 1921 Frunze was elected to the Central Committee and in January, 1925, became the Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council. A strong supporter of Grigory Zinoviev, Frunze came into conflict with Josef Stalin, one of Zinoviev's chief opponents. He supposedly died during a stomach operation on 31 October, 1925, though it is believed by some that Stalin arranged his death.

He was buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.

Memory

In 1926, the city of Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, was renamed Frunze in his honour. It reverted back to its former name in 1991.

The Frunze Military Academy , one of the most respected in the former USSR, was also named in his honour. Also, the honorific title of the Soviet 2nd Rifle Division was at some point the 2nd Belorussian Red Banner Rifle Division in the name of M.V. Frunze.

Quotes

"All that we do, every action, should correspond to the highest ideals of the Revolution."

"The Red Army was created by the workers and peasants and is lead by the will of the working class. That will is being carried out by the united Communist Party."