FRUNZE, MIKHAIL VASSILIEVICH Russian soldier, was the son of a peasant who had settled in Turkistan and become a surgeon. While at school he came in contact with socialists and on entering the Polytechnic Institute at St. Petersburg (Leningrad) he joined the Bolshevik section of the social democratic organization. In 1905 he worked in the industrial district of Ivanovo-Voznesensk and helped to organ ize the big textile strike of that year. He was frequently arrested and in 1907 was sentenced to four years penal servitude, and to a subsequent six years on the grounds that he had offered armed resistance to the police.
At the end of 1914 his penal servitude was exchanged for ban ishment to Siberia, where he was arrested for revolutionary ac tivities in the following year, but soon afterwards escaped from prison and the March revolution of 1917 found him in Minsk at the head of an illegal organization in the army. He became president of a Front Committee, and later president of a Soviet in the provinces, and at the time of the November revolution came to Moscow with a detachment of 2,000 men, with which he took part in the fighting in that city. After the revolt in Jaroslav he became military commissar of that district, and in Dec. 1918, commander of an army on the Eastern Front. He later became commander in chief of four armies and directed the operations against Admiral Kolchak. When the Eastern Front was divided, Frunze became commander on the Turkistan section of it, where he surrounded and destroyed Kolchak's southern army. He after wards took part in minor operations in Central Asia, returning to Europe in Sept. 1920 when he took command of the troops that eventually drove Gen. Wrangel out of the Crimea. He then commanded the military forces in the Ukraine. In 1924 he be came vice-president of the Revolutionary Military Council, and, in the absence of Trotsky, the actual head of the Red Army. He became president of this council and People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs in Jan. 1925, but died before the end of the year.