Mikhail Frunze

Mikhail Frunze won the Russian civil war in the east and in the Crimea, wrote the doctrine the Red Army used for the next twenty years, and died on an operating table at forty in circumstances nobody has ever settled. He was born in Turkestan, the son of a Moldovan military medical assistant and a Russian peasant woman, and became a Bolshevik as a student. He was sentenced to death twice before 1917 for his part in the 1905 revolution and had both sentences commuted to hard labour, which is where he spent most of the decade. He had no formal military training whatever. Given the Eastern Front in 1919 he broke Kolchak's offensive and drove him back across the Urals, then took Bukhara and Khiva, and in November 1920 forced the Perekop isthmus into the Crimea against Wrangel's fortifications - a frontal assault across a frozen salt lagoon that ended the civil war in European Russia. As a military theorist he argued for a single unified doctrine, a standing cadre army rather than a militia, and the subordination of everything in the state to the requirements of the next war; the argument was with Trotsky, and Frunze won it. He replaced Trotsky as People's Commissar for Military Affairs in January 1925. Ten months later he was ordered by the Politburo to have surgery for a stomach ulcer he did not want operated on, and died of chloroform poisoning during the procedure. A novel published the following year told the story as a political murder and was suppressed. The Frunze Military Academy still carries his name.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history