MIKHAIL VASILIEVICH FRUNZE

Mikhail Vasilievich Frunze was born in Bishkek — which was then called Pishpek — in 1885. His father was a Moldovian doctor«s assistant.

He spent a tempestuous time in Moscow, and after several arrests for revolutionary activity — as one of Lenin«s pupils, he eventually commanded the Red Guards which occupied the Kremlin in October 1917.

A major player in the civil war he was responsible for directing the defeat of the White Russian Army under Admiral Kolchak in Siberia and for routing another army commanded by General Wtangel in the Caucasus Mountains. In September 1918 he was dispatched to Tashkent in an armoured train to head a «Turkic Commission» along with another general, (General Kuibyshev), to prevent a counter-revolution; to purge the «elite», re-educate the masses and introduce the industrialisation of the region. He then led the Bolshevik forces which took Khiva (meeting virtually no resistance) and Bukhara (after a four day fight) in 1920, and then pushed the Basmachi rebels out of Ferghana valley.

He replaced Trotsky as War Commissar and introduced a system of conscription requiring compulsory peacetime military service and molded the Red Army into a formidable fighting force and revolutionary tool.

After Lenin«s death, he survived several mysterious car accidents, but eventually died after submitting to a stomach operation at the order of the Politburo in 1926. His home town was renamed Frunze in his honour. (The name was changed to Bishkek in 1991.) There is a statue of him standing outside Moscow and one of the leading Soviet Military academies was named after him.

The Frunze Museum (on Frunze Street) preserves many artifacts related to the general«s life and times, including what is said to be the house in which he as born … although many people say that the wrong house was preserved. Even so, the house is probably typical of the sort of dwelling in which Russian settlers of the period lived — and the thatched roof is the probably the only good example left in the city of what was at that time the universal roofing, although the house at 145 Moskovskaya is also typical of the wooden log houses built by early settlers — and is now in private ownership and has been renovated. There is a statue of M. V. Frunze on horseback facing the railway station at the top of Prospekt Erkindik.