Mikhail Frunze. Red Army Commander and Front Commander
M. Frunze in a photograph from 1919.
В previous article We discussed Mikhail Frunze's origins and early life, as well as his participation in the revolutionary struggle. Today, we'll continue this story and discuss him as an outstanding Soviet commander during the Civil War.
Red Commander
In the summer of 1918, Frunze was appointed military commissar of the Ivanovo-Voznesensk Governorate, and then of the entire Yaroslavl Military District. In these positions, he was actively involved in organizing Red Guard detachments, and in July, he drew attention to himself with his decisive actions in suppressing the Yaroslavl Uprising, organized by Boris Savinkov, one of the leaders of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. It should be remembered that the situation was very serious; the rebels were finally defeated only 15 days later.
He also managed to open two higher education institutions in Ivanovo-Voznesensk: a higher technical school (based on the Riga Polytechnic Institute evacuated to the city) and an institute of public education. By 1930, five separate institutes had been created from the technical school's faculties, transforming Ivanovo into a major scientific and educational center.
But let's return to 1918 and see that on December 26, Trotsky signed an order appointing Frunze commander of the 4th Army of the Eastern Front.
Commander of the 4th Army of the Eastern Front M. Frunze, January 1919.
Frunze's chief of staff was former major general of the tsarist army, Fyodor Novitsky, who, incidentally, recalled the beginning of his work with him as follows:
Frunze dreamed of getting what he called a "little regiment," preferably a mounted one, given his love of horseback riding. I urged Mikhail Vasilyevich not to be modest and to strive for an army commission. Such a prospect only amused Frunze, as he couldn't imagine himself as an army commander without any prior training or combat experience. I, however, had a completely different opinion.
F. F. Novitsky, future lieutenant general aviation and the head of the N. E. Zhukovsky Air Force Academy
By March 1919, Frunze had become commander of the Southern Group of the Eastern Front, which included the 1st, 4th, 5th, and Turkestan Armies. The 26-year-old Mikhail Tukhachevsky commanded the Fifth Army.
At Frunze's request, the Ivanovo Provincial Executive Committee sent a large group of Bolsheviks and non-party weavers to his disposal, from which a separate 220th regiment was formed – it became part of the 74th brigade of Chapaev's division.
Ivano-Voznesensk Weavers Regiment
Commander of the 220th Regiment G. Gorbachev and the commissar of this regiment E. Kapustyansky, June 1919.
By the way, in the famous 1934 film, Furmanov brings this regiment into Chapaev’s division.
A shock group was formed, which played a major role in subsequent events. It included the 25th (Chapayev) and 31st Rifle Divisions and a separate cavalry group.
In March and April 1919, Frunze was distracted by suppressing large-scale peasant unrest in the Samara and Simbirsk provinces, also known as the Chapan War. At the same time, Kolchak's armies were advancing from the east. The number of peasant rebels was large, but their units were quickly and easily defeated. By late April, Frunze's troops had launched an offensive against Kolchak, inflicting a series of defeats on him, so that very soon the former admiral's armies could only defend themselves. By May 1919, Buguruslan, Bugulma, and Belebey had been liberated. The White Guards made their final attempt to stop the Red forces near Ufa. It was then that Chapayev was wounded during air raids, and Frunze himself suffered a concussion.
Wounded Chapaev, D. Furmanov sitting on the left and P. Isaev lying down
This didn't stop the Reds, and on June 9, Chapayev's 25th Division entered Ufa, its commander awarded the Order of the Red Banner. The important Izhevsk-Votkinsk industrial region came under Soviet control. Frunze received his first Order of the Red Banner and was appointed commander of the Eastern Front.
Commander of the Eastern Front
Frunze and Trotsky at the parade in Samara, 1919
Kolchak's complete defeat in 1919 was only prevented by the fact that the most combat-ready units of the Eastern Front had to be sent against Denikin's Armed Forces of Southern Russia and Yudenich's Northwestern Army.
Chapaev's 25th Division was ordered to march toward Uralsk with the goal of cutting off the White Cossacks from Denikin's troops, and the 31st Division was sent to Voronezh—you'll remember that these divisions were part of the Shock Group created by Frunze.
The strong 2nd Division also left the Eastern Front: some units were sent to Tsaritsyn, others to Petrograd.
Soldiers of the 2nd Rifle Division of the Eastern Front near Petrograd, 1919.
The situation was truly dire: on September 17, 1919, Denikin's troops captured Sumy, Oboyan, and Stary Oskol, and on September 20, Kursk. And on September 28, Yudenich began his offensive on Petrograd. On October 6, Denikin's forces captured Voronezh, on October 13, Orel, and on October 20, Yudenich's army was close to Petrograd – Yamburg, Luga, Tsarskoye Selo, and Pavlovsk had already been captured, with only 20 kilometers remaining. It all ended in a terrible defeat for the White Guard troops. The armies of the Armed Forces of South Russia fled to Novorossiysk, the disastrous evacuation of which forever ruined Denikin's military reputation.
Yudenich's army retreated to Estonia, where it was disarmed, and its soldiers and officers were robbed and herded into camps, where conditions were so brutal that many fled to Soviet Russia.
Narva. Interned soldiers of Yudenich's army. February 1920.
Frunze's troops achieved success even earlier: Perm, Yekaterinburg, Zlatoust and Chelyabinsk were liberated, and on August 10, 1919, Frunze told a correspondent of the Izvestia newspaper:
Kolchak is broken and five-sixths defeated. He still has some reserves, and he will resist, holding on at advantageous positions. But essentially, the dispute with Kolchak is settled… The mood of the population in the areas occupied by our troops is entirely in our favor.
The central Soviet government fully agreed with him, and the task of finishing off Kolchak was entrusted to Vladimir Aleksandrovich Olderroga, a major general in the Tsarist army who had voluntarily joined the Red Army in the spring of 1918. And on August 15, Frunze was appointed commander of the Turkestan Front. This likely took into account the fact that the subject of the article was born in Pishpek (Bishkek), attended a gymnasium in Verny (Almaty), and was familiar with local customs and traditions.
On November 14, the remnants of Kolchak's army, led by Kappel, began a tragic retreat, which émigrés later called the "Great Siberian Ice March." It's worth noting that there was nothing grand about it. Between 100 and 150 White Guards advanced eastward from Barnaul and Novonikolaevsk (Novosibirsk) and were battered by everyone: the Red Army troops of the Eastern Front, partisans, and militias from the rebellious cities. Only 25-30 men reached Chita on March 14, 1920, half of whom were sick and wounded.
Commander of the Turkestan Front
The new Turkestan Front had to be opened because Kolchak's Southern Group of Forces, as well as units of the Orenburg and Ural Cossacks, had been pushed back into Central Asia, where they were still attempting to resist. In his new position, Frunze commanded approximately 114 fighters. This number subsequently increased through the mobilization of the local population. Almost immediately, Frunze launched the Aktyubinsk Offensive, during which, by September 4, his forces managed to defeat General Belov's army. The White Cossacks didn't hold out for long, but it was fighting the Ural Cossacks that Vasily Chapayev died.
The death of Chapaev
In the late autumn of 1918, the legendary Red divisional commander was sent to study at the Military Academy, but by early January 1919, he had left without permission and reported to Frunze, with whom he had developed a very good relationship. Initially, he commanded the separate Aleksandrovo-Gaisky Brigade, and in April, the 25th Division, which, as we recall, liberated Ufa and was then sent to Uralsk. Here, Chapaev's division was quite successful, and with a raid into the rear, on the town of Lbischensk, the Whites wanted to destroy its headquarters: they hoped to decapitate the enemy and sow confusion in the Red forces.
The headquarters building of Chapaev's division in Lbischensk (currently the village of Chapaev)
At this time, the main forces of the 25th Division were located 50 kilometers from Lbischensk, which, in addition to headquarters, housed the Revolutionary Committee, the tribunal, and the rear services. The divisional school was also located there, and its cadets were charged with defending the city in the event of a White attack (which no one believed would happen).
The Whites managed to assemble a cavalry strike force numbering between 1,200 and 2,000 men, and Colonel Timofey Sladkov was appointed to command it. This detachment also included his chief of staff, Nikolai Borodin, who, incidentally, died during this raid (in the Soviet film "Chapayev," this officer appears under the name Borozdin).
N. Borodin in a photograph from 1913
Colonel Borozdin in the film "Chapaev", 1934
Lbischensk was attacked around three o'clock in the morning on September 5. The Whites managed to achieve the effect of surprise, resulting in the deaths of about one and a half thousand poorly trained cadets and rear service personnel (many of whom did not even have weapons), 800 people were captured, many of whom were killed immediately. Only a small detachment (about 100 men), including Chapaev himself, offered fierce resistance. General Staff Colonel M. Izergin wrote about this:
Chapaev himself held out longer than anyone else with a small detachment, with whom he took refuge in one of the houses on the bank of the Ural, from where he had to be driven out artillery fire.
It was thanks to his actions that many Red Army soldiers were able to retreat to the river and cross to the other bank. Chapayev was not among the survivors. According to the most widespread version, proposed by Furmanov, the wounded divisional commander drowned while attempting to swim across the Ural River. In 1962, Chapayev's daughter, Klavdiya, received a clarifying letter from two Hungarians who had served in her father's division and were with him during the final battle on September 5, 1919. They reported that the divisional commander, wounded in the head and stomach but still alive, had been placed on a makeshift raft, but died during the crossing. He was buried there, the makeshift grave covered with branches.
It's worth noting, incidentally, that during the civil war, the Czechs and Slovaks, with rare exceptions like Jaroslav Hašek, sided with the Whites, while the Hungarians, as a rule, fought for the Reds—over 60 of them! And both sides noted the exceptional resilience and reliability of the Red Hungarian units.
Hungarians of the 3rd International Astrakhan Rifle Regiment
The traditional hatred between them was so great at that time that the Czechs and Slovaks usually immediately shot captured Hungarians, and the Hungarians shot captured Slovaks and Czechs.
One of the "Red" Hungarians, Mate Zalka, under the name "General Lukács," led the 12th International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War and died on June 11, 1937, near Huesca. Imre Nagy, who became the head of the Hungarian government after World War II, according to investigator N. A. Sokolov, even participated in the execution of the family of citizen Nicholas Romanov (former Emperor Nicholas II). In 1956, he announced Hungary's withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact and appealed to the UN for the protection of its sovereignty. At the insistence of János Kádor (and against the opinion of Khrushchev), he was hanged on June 16, 1958. "treason and conspiracy to overthrow the people's democratic system"And Bela Kun would become chairman of the Crimean Revolutionary Committee in November 1920, but more on that later, in another article.
Let's return to the events of our civil war.
The Whites' hopes for disruption in the 25th Division's operations were dashed. Its soldiers were eager to avenge their beloved commander, and it became the main striking force of the 4th Army.
On October 4, the White Army's Separate Ural Army became active, coordinating its actions with Denikin's advance on Tsaritsyn. But by November, it was cut off from other White Guard forces and surrendered one position after another. And on December 19, 1919, the Kazakh government of Alash Orda, allied with the Ural Army, announced the capitulation of its troops.
Algemba
Meanwhile, the young Soviet republic was desperately short of oil, and so, on December 24, 1919, the Council of Workers' and Peasants' Defense issued a resolution ordering the State Construction Committee to immediately begin construction of a railway line and an oil pipeline from Aleksandrov-Gai to Emba, leading to the Dossor and Makat oil fields, which were not yet occupied by the Red Army. The project was ambitious but difficult to implement: the route to the oil fields lay through waterless, salt-marsh semi-deserts and deserts.
The proposed route of the Algemba oil pipeline
Cavalry units of Frunze's 4th Army of the Turkestan Front captured these fields on January 8, 1920. On January 17, 1920, the Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council, L. Trotsky, sent Frunze a telegram ordering the 4th Army to be transferred to the construction of the aforementioned railway. However, the 4th Army remained a combat army and was not relegated to labor status, as some others were. Furthermore, the 25th (Chapayev) Division was sent to the Polish Front.
On January 19, Frunze sent a telegram to Moscow stating that all necessary orders had been given, but he also indicated:
Taking into account the difficulties of the present difficult conditions of transport and communications, as well as the dismantling of the aforementioned sections of the tracks, the delivery of a large quantity of stocks of building materials and their distribution along the line of the planned construction, the difficulty of placing the required number of work teams outside the villages in the unusual conditions of the waterless steppes and the lack of fuel, I consider it my duty to report that the implementation of the construction will encounter major obstacles.
He was right: construction was never completed, especially since Soviet power was established in Baku and Grozny in the spring of 1920. However, due to inertia, work at Algemba continued until August 1921. Enormous amounts of money were wasted.
The Agony of Dutov's Orenburg Army
Let's return to December 1919. By the beginning of the month, the White Ural Army's front had finally collapsed. In January 1920, this military campaign ended with the liberation of the city of Guryev. Only 162 Cossacks left for Krasnovodsk and then Persia with the last commander of the Ural Army, Vladimir Tolstov.
Meanwhile, Dutov's 20-strong army, which also included General Bakich's units and the Cossack detachments of Zakharov and Razumnik-Stepanov, retreated south—through Karkaralinsk to Sergiopol and Semirechye, where the half-mad sadist Boris Annenkov still held out. The last stage of their journey was in history The "Hunger March" also began. An epidemic of typhus and typhoid fever also broke out. By the end of December 1919, having lost 9 of their 20 men, the Orenburgers arrived at Annenkov's domain—and were horrified by the terror and atrocities perpetrated on the territory. General Bakich recalled:
The method of command and order in the partisan units of Ataman Annenkov, where the basic requirements of military service were not observed, law and order were denied, incredible atrocities and robberies were allowed, both in relation to the peaceful population of villages and stanitsas, as well as in relation to the ranks of my detachment, who, due to illness, were unable to stand up for themselves, caused bitterness against the partisans of General Annenkov on the part of the ranks of my detachment.
M. Frunze's victories in Central Asia
On October 13, 1919, Frunze's troops joined forces with units of the Turkestan Soviet Republic, and soon the first cotton train was sent from Tashkent to Orenburg. In February 1920, after the railway was restored, Frunze arrived in Tashkent with the front headquarters.
On February 4, 1920, Krasnovodsk, where large White Guard and British forces had been stationed until then, was captured. Vladimir Mikhailovich Ionov took part in the operation to liberate the city as the chief of artillery. He was the son of a tsarist general who had defected to the Soviets, a former governor of the Semirechye region, a recipient of nine imperial orders and the Golden St. George's Sword. He was also the brother of the White Ataman of the Semirechye Cossack Host, who became an ally of the aforementioned Boris Annenkov.
The Whites' position was frankly hopeless. On April 2, 1920, Orenburg Ataman Dutov was the first to cross the Kara-Saryk Pass into Chinese territory, followed by General Bakich and Ataman Annenkov. However, even without them, the situation in Central Asia remained tense. Medieval vassal states of the Russian Empire—the Khanate of Khiva and the Emirate of Bukhara—still existed there, and their rulers were hostile to the new central government.
Frunze during negotiations in Bukhara, April 1920.
The population of Turkestan was also terrorized by Basmachi gangs, as reported in the "Report of the Secret Department of the Cheka on the insurgent movement as of November 1920":
In Turkestan, in the Fergana region, a special kind of banditry—Basmachi—is rampant. "Basmach" means "robber" in the native Uzbek language. But Basmachi has long ceased to be just a bandit movement. It has transformed into a politically White Guard anti-Soviet movement. The Basmachi contingent consists of kulaks (Sarts) or bais (small landowners) dissatisfied with Soviet policy in the native kishlaks (villages). The movement is nationalist in nature against Russians... The Basmachi even attack their own people, robbing and killing. Recently, they have been attacking railways. and they dismantle the roads, burn cotton and soap factories, attack rich cotton reserves and burn them, dealing a blow to our textile industry... By the way, among the Basmachi there are many Russian officers and Cossacks from Annenkov's defeated detachment, who made their way to Fergana from China.
The fight against the Basmachi dragged on for many years; in a battle with a large detachment of these bandits in May 1921, the aforementioned Vladimir Ionov lost his arm.
What about Khiva and Bukhara?
In November 1919, an uprising broke out in the Khiva Khanate, but the Red Army came to the rescue, and the khan's forces were routed. On February 2, Said Abdullah Khan abdicated, and on April 26, 1920, the Khorezm People's Soviet Republic was proclaimed.
On August 28, 1920, an uprising broke out in Bukhara (its participants reached five thousand), and its leaders appealed to the Soviet authorities and Frunze for help. About nine and a half thousand Red Army soldiers with 40 guns headed for Bukhara, supported by the Aral Military Flotilla. The emir's army consisted of about 43 fighters and 55 guns. Nevertheless, by August 29, Frunze's forces had already captured cities such as Karshi, Shakhrisabz, Termez, Chardzhui, and Merv. And on September 2, Bukhara was stormed—and it must be said that the Red Army's losses in the fighting on the narrow streets of that city were quite heavy. The emir fled, pursued by the aforementioned Vladimir Ionov. At the border with Afghanistan, he abandoned his harem of 300 women. On October 8, 1920, the Bukhara People's Soviet Republic was proclaimed.
But even earlier, on September 20, Frunze received a new assignment – he was now to command the Southern Front, which was operating against Wrangel's army. Shortly before his departure, the subject of this article had his first child, a daughter, Tatyana, born in Tashkent.
Frunze with his wife, daughter and wife's sister, 1921.
We will discuss Frunze's Crimean triumph in a separate article.
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