Who or what killed Mikhail Vasilyevich Frunze?
Nearly a century after the “Bolshevik Napoleon”—the legendary commander who stamped communist rule across Central Asia—exhaled his last breath atop an operating table in Moscow, the answer remains unknown.
Was it gastric ulcers that sent the father of the Red Army to his doom in 1925? The doctors toiling to save Frunze’s life insisted it was so. Or was the famed general’s death orchestrated—of course—by Josef Stalin? (Stalin urged the dangerous surgery on a reluctant Frunze, not necessarily a tender gesture from the Cannibal of the Kremlin, and a medical referral that, alas, couldn’t be declined.) Or was the blame—per default Soviet conspiracy theory—on the eternal Other?
“Some say the doctors were from the Jewish community in Bukhara,” says Damira Stamkulova, a curator at the Frunze Museum, in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan. “They got their revenge on Frunze for his violent attack on their city.”
Stamkulova shrugs. Like so many details of the Russian Revolution, and especially those attached to the struggle’s vast, bloody, and chaotic Central Asian front, it is all so murky, so unclear, so mysterious: much like the Frunze Museum itself.
Red tchotchkes: Gen. Frunze immortalized on vase and in prose.
Paul Salopek
The building is a three-story cube. It occupies a downtown corner of Bishkek, Frunze’s hometown. Two middle-aged women sit sleepily behind a dim lobby counter. They are the guides: The warrior’s shrine is a matriarchy.
Mikhail Frunze is among those actors of history who, unknown to most of the world, have shaped our modern lives. He helped bring the U.S.S.R. to the immensity of Central Asia.
A précis. Born in 1885. The son of a Moldovan colonist and a Russian mother. Radicalized as a teenager. He skipped classes at university in St. Petersburg to march against the Tsar. There was a frostbitten decade of exile in Siberia. After the 1917 revolution, as an extraordinarily young but combat-hardened leader in the Russian civil war, he used armored trains, cars, horse cavalry, and 11 rickety biplanes to swing Red troops swiftly back and forth across the plains and icy crags of modern-day Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan—a tumultuous campaign of fighting White monarchists, crushing feudal Silk Road khans and indigenous Basmachi rebels, and suppressing peasant revolts. His martial prowess earned him the attention of U.S. Army scholars, and his exploits on the remote Asian steppes helped spawn a Soviet genre of “Red Western” films. (The most famous is White Sun of the Desert, a 1973 cult classic that even today is watched, as a good luck ritual, by cosmonauts before each space launch.)
“In Soviet times he was a very famous man. Many military officers used to visit. But today almost nobody remembers,” Stamkulova says dejectedly. “Since our independence, he is not even in schoolbooks anymore.”
It’s true.
The museum is a tomb. Its dusty fluorescent tubes beam their grey light down on ponderous bronze statues, on faded woolen greatcoats, on a carriage-mounted machine gun. The glass covering the exhibits is fogged by the passage of time. Wall paint peels. In one hangar-like atrium: a peasant’s cottage, alleged to be Frunze’s childhood house, stands in empty silence. Over the course of nearly three hours spent perusing Frunze memorabilia (ceramic vases, long unread memoirs, medals, an honorary sword awarded after the ruthless conquest of Bukhara), I see just one group of local children bustle quickly through, chattering and snapping selfies on their phones.
The place is a liminal artifact: a wormhole made of concrete, a street address out of time. It is a monument to forgetting as much as to memory.
To stumble into the Frunze Museum—more than 25 years after Kyrgyzstan declared independence from the collapsed Soviet Union—is a bit like walking into a post-American future where an independent Sioux nation-state has thrown off Washington’s yoke but still maintains a museum honoring George Custer. The analogy is flawed, of course: The two colonizations, one in Central Asia and the other in the American West, were different in their tragedy, and in some ways the Russians were far more humane. Still, some tens if not hundreds of thousands of Central Asians perished in the years of violent upheavals before, during, and after the toppling of the last Tsar. The main casualty in the Frunze Museum remains Frunze, done in by chloroform.
I step out of the museum that belongs in a museum.
My translator, Sergei Gnezdilov, and I walk a block down Frunze Street and turn right, to arrive at one of the few other locales in Bishkek that still commemorates Mikhail Vasilyevich Frunze: a posh restaurant. We order lunch off non-proletariat menus elegantly labeled Frunze. The cappuccinos come with biscuits also stenciled Frunze.
Red tchotchkes: Gen. Frunze immortalized on vase and in prose.
Paul Salopek
The building is a three-story cube. It occupies a downtown corner of Bishkek, Frunze’s hometown. Two middle-aged women sit sleepily behind a dim lobby counter. They are the guides: The warrior’s shrine is a matriarchy.
Mikhail Frunze is among those actors of history who, unknown to most of the world, have shaped our modern lives. He helped bring the U.S.S.R. to the immensity of Central Asia.
A précis. Born in 1885. The son of a Moldovan colonist and a Russian mother. Radicalized as a teenager. He skipped classes at university in St. Petersburg to march against the Tsar. There was a frostbitten decade of exile in Siberia. After the 1917 revolution, as an extraordinarily young but combat-hardened leader in the Russian civil war, he used armored trains, cars, horse cavalry, and 11 rickety biplanes to swing Red troops swiftly back and forth across the plains and icy crags of modern-day Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan—a tumultuous campaign of fighting White monarchists, crushing feudal Silk Road khans and indigenous Basmachi rebels, and suppressing peasant revolts. His martial prowess earned him the attention of U.S. Army scholars, and his exploits on the remote Asian steppes helped spawn a Soviet genre of “Red Western” films. (The most famous is White Sun of the Desert, a 1973 cult classic that even today is watched, as a good luck ritual, by cosmonauts before each space launch.)
“In Soviet times he was a very famous man. Many military officers used to visit. But today almost nobody remembers,” Stamkulova says dejectedly. “Since our independence, he is not even in schoolbooks anymore.”
It’s true.
The museum is a tomb. Its dusty fluorescent tubes beam their grey light down on ponderous bronze statues, on faded woolen greatcoats, on a carriage-mounted machine gun. The glass covering the exhibits is fogged by the passage of time. Wall paint peels. In one hangar-like atrium: a peasant’s cottage, alleged to be Frunze’s childhood house, stands in empty silence. Over the course of nearly three hours spent perusing Frunze memorabilia (ceramic vases, long unread memoirs, medals, an honorary sword awarded after the ruthless conquest of Bukhara), I see just one group of local children bustle quickly through, chattering and snapping selfies on their phones.
The place is a liminal artifact: a wormhole made of concrete, a street address out of time. It is a monument to forgetting as much as to memory.
To stumble into the Frunze Museum—more than 25 years after Kyrgyzstan declared independence from the collapsed Soviet Union—is a bit like walking into a post-American future where an independent Sioux nation-state has thrown off Washington’s yoke but still maintains a museum honoring George Custer. The analogy is flawed, of course: The two colonizations, one in Central Asia and the other in the American West, were different in their tragedy, and in some ways the Russians were far more humane. Still, some tens if not hundreds of thousands of Central Asians perished in the years of violent upheavals before, during, and after the toppling of the last Tsar. The main casualty in the Frunze Museum remains Frunze, done in by chloroform.
I step out of the museum that belongs in a museum.
My translator, Sergei Gnezdilov, and I walk a block down Frunze Street and turn right, to arrive at one of the few other locales in Bishkek that still commemorates Mikhail Vasilyevich Frunze: a posh restaurant. We order lunch off non-proletariat menus elegantly labeled Frunze. The cappuccinos come with biscuits also stenciled Frunze.
Power lunch: A capitalist restaurant commemorates the Bolshevik general—sort of.
Paul Salopek
“Didn’t he fight the fascists in Germany?” the waitress guesses, off by a war.
During 66 years of Soviet rule the capital of Kyrgyzstan was called Frunze. After independence in 1991 the city reverted to its original nomad name. (Bishkek is a stick used for stirring fermented mare’s milk.)
Gnezdilov and I walk the city’s tree-lined sidewalks. We decide to ask young people at random if they know who Frunze was. Nobody in their 20s or younger does. I begin to notice, after our third or fourth interview, that Gnezdilov focuses our historical research on female pedestrians.
“What?” he asks, with mock innocence, when I shoot him a look. “What?”
It is springtime. There is solace in this.
