Mikhail Vasilyevich Frunze (Russian: Михаил Васильевич Фрунзе; Romanian: Mihail Frunză; 2 February 1885 – 31 October 1925) was a Soviet revolutionary, politician, army officer and military theorist.
Born to a Romanian father and a Russian mother in Russian Turkestan, Frunze attended the Saint Petersburg Polytechnical University and became an active member of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). Following the RSDLP ideological split, he sided with Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik faction. He led the textile workers strike in Ivanovo during the 1905 Russian Revolution, for which he was later sentenced to death before being commuted to life-long hard labour in Siberia. He escaped ten years later and took active part in the 1917 February Revolution in Minsk and the October Revolution in Moscow. Frunze distinguished himself as one of the most successful Red Army commanders during the Russian Civil War, achieving major victories over the White Army of Pyotr Wrangel in Crimea and Nestor Makhno's anarchist movement in Ukraine. In 1921, Frunze was elected to the Central Committee of the Communist Party. In 1925, he was named chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council.
Frunze died in 1925 from chloroform poisoning during surgery for a chronic ulcer. It has been alleged that Frunze was assassinated by Joseph Stalin, who arranged the surgery. He was buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. The capital of the Kirghiz SSR and his birthplace, Pishpek (modern Bishkek), was renamed after him from 1926 until 1991. The Frunze Military Academy, one of the most prestigious military educational institutions in the Soviet Union, was also named in his honour.
Frunze was born in 1885 in Pishpek (now Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan), then a small Imperial Russian garrison town in the Kyrgyz part of Russian Turkestan (Semirechye Oblast). His father was a Bessarabian Romanian para-medic (feldsher) (originally from the Kherson Governorate) and his mother was Russian. Frunze began his higher studies at Verniy (present-day Almaty), and in 1904 he attended the Saint Petersburg Polytechnical University.
Frunze became active in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). At the Second Congress of the RSDLP in London (1903), Vladimir Lenin and Julius Martov, the two main leaders, confronted each other in an ideological split over party tactics (Martov argued for a large party of activists, whilst Lenin wanted a small group of professional revolutionaries with a large fringe group of sympathisers). Frunze at the age of 18 sided with Lenin's majority, the so-called Bolsheviks ("majoritarians"), as opposed to Martov's minority, the Mensheviks (or "minoritarians").
Two years after the Second Congress, Frunze became an important leader in the 1905 Revolution. He led striking textile workers in Shuya and Ivanovo. Following the end of the movement, Frunze was arrested in 1907 and sentenced to death; he was imprisoned and spent several months on death row awaiting his execution. His sentence was commuted to life at hard labour. After 10 years in Siberian prisons, Frunze escaped to Chita. There he became editor of the Bolshevik weekly newspaper Vostochnoe Obozrenie (Eastern Review).
During the February Revolution of 1917, Frunze headed the Minsk civilian militia before his election as 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.
After the October Revolution of 1917, Frunze was appointed in 1918 as Military Commissar for the Ivanovo-Voznesensk Province. In the course of the Russian Civil War of 1917–1922, he was appointed as head of the Southern Army Group of the Red Army Eastern Front (March 1919). After Frunze's troops defeated Admiral Alexander Kolchak and the White Army in Omsk, Leon Trotsky (the head of the Red Army) gave overall command of the Eastern Front to him (19 July 1919). Frunze drove out Basmachi insurgents and White Army troops from his native Turkestan. He captured Khiva in February and Bukhara in September 1920.
In November 1920, Frunze's army took the Crimea and managed to push White general Pyotr Wrangel and his troops out of Russia. As commander of the southern front, Frunze also led the destruction of Nestor Makhno's anarchist movement in Ukraine and the nationalist movement of Symon Petliura.
In December 1921, Frunze visited Ankara, during the Turkish War of Independence, as an ambassador of the Ukrainian SSR, and established Turkish–Soviet relations. A statue of Frunze is a part of the Republic Monument at the Taksim Square, in Istanbul.
In 1921, Frunze was elected to the Central Committee of the Russian Bolshevik Party. On 2 June 1924 he became candidate member of the Politburo and in January 1925, became the Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council.
Frunze's support of Grigory Zinoviev was enough to attract the unwelcome attention of Joseph Stalin, one of Zinoviev's chief opponents. They had previously been on good terms, as Stalin had displayed respect towards his fellow "old guard" revolutionary and former prisoner.
Frunze was a key eyewitness to the Greek genocide in the visit he made to Turkey between 1921 and 1922. As an individual representing a pro-Turkish state, the Soviet Union, his eyewitness account is particularly notable.
During his diplomatic mission, Frunze documented the total decimation of Greek communities in Pontus. He noted that all Greek males over sixteen were deported and forced into labour battalions, writing how Topal Osman's irregulars "burnt, raped, and killed without exception all Greeks and Armenians, killed children by smashing them against the pavement". He expressed his "moral repugnance" to the "sheer, wild terror" he witnessed. Frunze noted an incident in his memoirs:
I shall remember this road for the rest of my life. Along its entire 30-verst length we constantly ran into bodies. I personally counted 58, many of them raped and mutilated. In one place we ran into the body of a beautiful girl, with her head severed and placed in her arms. In another, the body of a graceful, blond little girl, no more than seven or eight years old, bare-legged, in just a shift. The girl obviously had been crying, pressing her face against the earth, and she remained in that position, pinned to the earth by an asker's [Turkish soldier's] bayonet.
Historian John Nikolopoulos commented on Frunze's eyewitness testimony:
Frunze's diary is a treat beyond his faithful depiction of Turkish efforts to rationalize the on-going genocide and his own Bolshevik view of the conflict as a result of the cynical manipulation of the naive and unsuspecting agriculture population by Western powers. What stands out irrepressibly is Frunze's masterful eyewitness reporting. And it soon becomes apparent, in the course of the narrative, that the internal contradictions between his perceptions and the rationalizations he conscientiously attempts to articulate can only be resolved in one way – direct action in favor of the victims.
Frunze as an attempted rescuer