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Mikhail Vasilyevich Frunze is a Russian Bolshevik and General of the Russian Civil War. After acting as a Military Commissar in Western Russia in the early stages of the civil war, where he made a name for himself by suppressing Boris Savinkov's Yaroslavl Rebellion in July 1918, he would later be one of the persons primarily responsible for the botched Bolshevik campaign along the Ural river in mid-1919, a main factor for the White victory in the civil war.
Now exiled, Frunze enjoys limited influence within the Red Russian émigré community in Western Europe and currently is in service of the Armed Forces of the Union of Britain as a military advisor and army commander.
History[]
Early Life and Early Political Activity[]
Mikhail Vasilyevich Frunze was born in Pishpek in Semirechye Oblast, Russian Turkestan, the wide untamed Russian frontier near the border to Chinese Xinjiang. His father was a Romanian paramedic from Bessarabia and his mother an ethnic Russian. At a young age, Frunze attended school in Verniy, the capital of Semirechye Oblast, and enrolled at St. Petersburg Polytechnical University in 1904. There, he would be introduced to the revolutionary ideas that were quite popular in urban Russia at that time for the first time. Later that year, he joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP).
Around the same time, an ideological split had been ongoing within the party; The "Mensheviks" under the lead of Julius Martov were in favour of democratic, moderate socialism, while Vladimir Lenin's "Bolsheviks" firmly stood in for a violent, radical revolution akin to the famous one in France. Frunze decided to follow Lenin's more radical approach.
In January 1905, government troops massacred protesters in Saint Petersburg, triggering the Russian Revolution of 1905; Frunze, while partaking in said protests, was only wounded in the arm, which would be the defining event that led him to become a "revolutionary general" a decade later. In the nation-wide unrest that followed the massacre, Frunze led striking textile workers in Shuya and Ivanovo to the northeast of Moscow. He soon rose to regional prominence and joined the small RSDLP committee in Moscow. During the Moscow uprising of 1905, he commanded a Bolshevik combat squad.
In 1906, Frunze was the delegate from Ivanovo-Voznesensk on the Fourth RSDLP Congress in Stockholm, Sweden, where he met the famous Vladimir Lenin in person. Originally, he was going to attend the Fifth RSDLP Congress, which was to be held in London, as well, but he was arrested by the Tsarist police before and sentenced to hard labour in Dmitrovka.
Exile in Siberia and Return to the West[]
On 21 February 1907, Frunze attacked and tried to kill a policeman while imprisoned at Dmitrovka. He was sentenced to death for attempted murder, but this was later reprieved, his sentence being commuted to eternal exile in Siberia. After several years in multiple prisons, for example in Vladimir and Alexandrovsk, he was sent to Manzurka northeast of Irkutsk near Lake Baikal in March 1914.
However, in Augut 1915, he managed to escape and flee to Chita, one of the largest urban settlements in Transbaikal. There, he became editor of the Bolshevik weekly newspaper Vostochnoe Obozrenie (Eastern Perspective) and worked for the statistical department of the local Russian Resettlement Department. In 1916 he moved to Moscow, and then, in the beginning of April with a fake passport, to Belarus, where he became active in the All-Russian Zemstvo Union, a civil society organisation set up by the Tsarist administration to support sick and wounded soldiers, on behalf of the Bolshevik Party, with the aim to agitate the front soldiers in favour of revolution: Frunze established underground party cells in the 3rd and 10th Armies of the Russian Western Front.
February and October Revolutions[]
In early 1917, the February Revolution broke out in Petrograd, plunging the Russian Empire into chaos and leading to the proclamation of the Russian Republic. On 4 March 1917, by order of the civil commandant of the city of Minsk, Frunze was appointed temporary chief of the militia of the All-Russian Zemstvo Union for the protection of order in the city of Minsk against the revolutionaries. Frunze however, who was of course a secret operative of the Bolsheviks, would use this newly-gained power to seize the Minsk Police Office as well as most important local state institutions. He was supported by local soldier detachments and workers' combat teams.
By mid-1917, Frunze had become the most powerful man in Minsk and possibly all of Belarus. He was Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Council of Peasant Deputies of the Minsk and Vilna provinces, chief editor of a local Bolshevik newspaper, organizer and member of the Minsk Municipal Committee of the RSDLP, member of the Soldiers' Committee of the Western Front and member of the Executive Committee of the Minsk Board of Worker and Soldier Deputies. Frunze therefore had become one of the most influential Bolsheviks in Western Russia just over night. In September, he was transferred by the party committee to Shuya, where he already had worked more than ten years prior during the Revolution of 1905.
During the October Revolution, when the Bolsheviks staged a bloodless coup against the provisional government, taking control of various key transport, communication, printing and utilities buildings in Petrograd, Frunze was present in Moscow, where the Bolsheviks were firmly entrenched through the Moscow Committee and the Moscow Regional Bureau, and participated in the violent confrontations during the Moscow Bolshevik Uprising.
Throughout 1918, Frunze served as Military Commissar for the Ivanovo-Voznesensk Province and Chairman of the provincial committee of the Russian Communist Party in the region. When Boris Savinkov's Union for the Defense of the Motherland and Freedom launched the Yaroslavl Uprising with the support of Lavr Kornilov and the White Russian Volunteer Army in July 1918, Frunze was one of the main commanders responsible for the uprising's fast and efficient suppression. From August 1918, he was Military Commissar of Yaroslavl Military District.
Russian Civil War[]
In March 1919, Frunze was made head of the Southern Army Group of the Eastern Front. Frunze fought fiercely along the Ural river against Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak, participating in the defense of Uralsk during the Spring offensive of the White Army. While he was able to capture Saratov with the 4th Army in May, Uralsk would fall shortly after, severely strengthening the Whites in Central Russia, as Kornilov's and Kolchak's forces were now not cut off from each other anymore.
WORK IN PROGRESS. THE REST OF FRUNZE'S INVOLVEMENT IN THE CIVIL WAR IS TBA ONCE THE RUSSIA REWORK IS REVEALED
Post-Civil War[]
With the fall of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic at the hands of the Whites, Frunze and many other high-ranking Bolshevik politicians and military leaders evacuated Russia via Arkhangelsk and resettled to the Commune of France. Most Bolsheviks would soon fall into obscurity; While former Soviet army commanders were able to enroll at French military academies or become commanders for the newly established Communard armed forces, most Bolshevik political theorists spent their exile as semi-successful newspaper editors within the Red Russian emigré community.
WIP