Mikhail Frunze

Mikhail Vasilyevich Frunze (Russian: Михаи́л Васи́льевич Фру́нзе; Romanian: Mihail Vasilievici Frunză; 2 February [O.S. 21 January] 1885 – 31 October 1925) was a Bolshevik leader during and just prior to the Russian Revolution of 1917. He was a major Red Army commander in the Russian Civil War and is best known for defeating Baron Wrangel in Crimea.

Life and political activity

Frunze was born in Pishpek, then a small Imperial Russian garrison town in the Kyrgyz part of Russian Turkestan (Semirechye Oblast), to a Moldovan medical practitioner (originally from the Kherson Governorate) and his Russian wife. He began his studies at Verniy (present-day Almaty), and in 1904 he attended the Saint Petersburg Polytechnical University. At the Second Congress of the Social Democratic Party Labour Party in London (1903), during the ideological split between Vladimir Lenin and Julius Martov, the two main party leaders, 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 sided with Lenin's majority, the so-called Bolsheviks ("majoritarians", opposed to Martov's minority, the Mensheviks or "minoritarians").