Mikhail Frunze

Mikhail Vasilyevich Frunze was a Soviet revolutionary, politician, army officer and military theorist.

Born to a Bessarabian father and a Russian mother in Russian Turkestan, Frunze attended the Saint Petersburg Polytechnical University and became an active member of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Following the RSDLP ideological split, he sided with Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik faction. He led the textile workers strike in Ivanovo during the 1905 Russian Revolution, for which he was later sentenced to death before being commuted to life-long hard labour in Siberia.