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exile in 1914 to Irkutsk province, but he escaped
to Chita in 1915. The revolutionary year 1917
first found Frunze at the head of the Bolshevik
movement in Minsk, Belorussia. In October
1917, at the head of 2,000 workers and soldiers,
he was instrumental in the Bolshevik victory in
Moscow, after a weeklong battle. During the
Russian civil war he fought with distinction,
defeating
KOLCHAK
's forces in the Urals in 1919.
As commander of the eastern front, he secured
Bolshevik control of Turkestan, including the
nominally independent Emirate of
BUKHARA
.In
November 1920 he led the capture of Crimea,
routing
WRANGEL
's troops and ending the White
military presence in Russian territory. Frunze
sided with
STALIN
in his struggles with
TROTSKY
,
particularly on the issue of using ex-czarist offi-
cers whom Trotsky had recruited during the civil
war. After Trotsky's resignation in 1925, Frunze
was appointed people's commissar of war in Jan-
uary 1925, Frunze was the author of the “unitary
military doctrine,” which envisaged that the mil-
itary should be trained for offensive action and
dedicated to carrying out one of the goals of the
COMMUNIST PARTY
, world revolution. Frunze
helped lay the foundations of the efficient Soviet
machine by introducing conscription and stan-
dardizing military uniforms and formations. He
died on October 31, 1925, after a prolonged ill-
ness. After his death, his hometown was renamed
Frunze, by which name it was known until the
end of Soviet rule in 1991. It has been renamed
Bishkek, capital of Kyrgyzstan. The Military
Academy in Moscow was renamed the Frunze
Academy, a name it retains to this day.
party line than to any special commitment to
women's politics. She began her political career
as first party secretary of one of the Moscow city
districts (1942-50), before becoming second sec-
retary of the entire Moscow city party apparatus.
In 1954, with Khrushchev on the ascendance,
she became the first secretary of the Moscow
Communist Party, essentially the top party city
official, a formidable achievement for a woman in
the 1950s. She had also risen in the Communist
Party apparatus during these years, becoming a
candidate member of the Central Committee in
1952, and a full member of the Central Commit-
tee in 1956. That same year she was elected as a
Central Committee secretary, an important step-
ping stone toward the pinnacle of party power,
the Politburo, which she reached in 1957. By
1960, however, her fortunes had changed. She
lost her Central Committee secretaryship and
her Presidium seat the following year. Instead
she was appointed minister of culture, a position
she held through the fall of Khrushchev and into
the
BREZHNEV
era. Her conformist, conservative
cultural outlook dismayed the Soviet intelli-
gentsia and was emblematic of the Brezhnev
regime's attempt to restrain the limited freedoms
the cultural intelligentsia had gained during
parts of the Khrushchev era.
futurism
A literary and artistic trend, futurism flourished
with particular strength and originality in Russia
between 1910 and 1930. Its name and its princi-
pal idea, the abandonment of the past and the
creation of a new art consonant with the
machine age, initially drew from the ideas of Ital-
ian and French futurism. Most Russian Futurists,
however, were far more uncompromising in
their rejection of existing society and, with the
onset of the Russian Revolution, were presented
with a much greater social canvas to realize their
ideas. There were several organized groups of
Futurists, the most important, the cubo-futurists,
being also the most radical in both the artistic and
the political sense. Their leader and theorist was
Furtseva, Ekaterina Alekseevna
(1910-1974)
Soviet official
One of the few women to rise to the top of Soviet
politics, in 1957 Furtseva became the first woman
to be chosen to the
COMMUNIST PARTY
Politburo,
known as the Presidium from 1946-64. A pro-
tégé of Nikita
KHRUSHCHEV
, Furtseva's promi-
nence was due more to her ability to follow the
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