The legendary Red Army commander Mikhail Frunze, who died in October 1925 in Moscow, could hardly have imagined that two Soviet cities would be named after him. The first is in Kyrgyzstan, where he was born. The second - in Moldova, where he was born and lived before moving to the main city of the future Kyrgyzstan - Pishpek, his father. Russia, in which Frunze spent almost his entire adult life, could not honor the memory of one of its first generals in the same way. There was no city called Frunze in it and there is not.
Sugar chapter
On the map of the Soviet Union at one time it was possible to find a lot of cities that had the same names - Donetsk, Zheleznogorsk, Kaliningrad, Kirov, Sverdlovsk, Sovetsk and others. The city of Frunze was also included in this list, represented in two former Soviet republics - Moldova and Kyrgyzstan.
Little is known about the first of them, a small town in the Ocnitsa region of this now sovereign country with a population of about two thousand. The city, called Frunză in Moldovan, is located and has preserved the memory of the commander of the Red Army and his father, a native of these lands, to this day, in the very north of Moldova. Where the Ocnita - Zhmerynka railway line passes. Moreover, the local station has a different name - Gyrbovo. Two more towns in the area are called Ocnita and Ataki. The closest neighbor of the border region of the country is the Vinnytsia region of Ukraine.
Once the Moldovan Frunze was famous for its town-forming Gyrbovsky sugar plant and the plant, which produced citric acid, which was available in many Soviet houses. But after the collapse of the USSR and Moldova's independence, their products outside the country ceased to be in demand. And now Frunze can be considered, rather, an urban-type settlement. The same, for example, as the settlement of the same name in the Luhansk region of Ukraine.
Fiefdom of generals
A completely different fate befell the Central Asian Frunze. Both in Soviet times and now, the city was not just large, but also a capital city, it was the administrative center of now also sovereign Kyrgyzstan. Frunze is located in the north of the modern country, in the famous Chuy valley, 25 kilometers from the border with Kazakhstan (Chimkent region) and at an altitude of about 900 meters above sea level. The northern foot of the Kyrgyz Tien Shan ridge is located 40 kilometers from it.
The Kyrgyz Frunze gained his fame in the Soviet Union thanks to, among other things, famous Soviet generals closely associated with him - Ivan Panfilov and Mikhail Frunze. In particular, it was in the capital of Kyrgyzstan and from its inhabitants in 1941 that the 316th rifle division, led by the former military commissar of the city Panfilov and distinguished in the battles of the Great Patriotic War for Moscow, was formed. After the death of the commander, she became the 8th Panfilov Guards Rifle Division and reached Berlin.
And the Soviet People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs, as well as the chairman of his Revolutionary Military Council, Army Commander (which corresponds to the current general's position) Mikhail Frunze is a native of this Central Asian city. In 1885, when the future Soviet military leader was born, he was called Pishpek for 60 years and was the center of the Semirechensk region of Tsarist Russia. The name Frunze "namesake" received in 1926. And ten years later, right up to the 91st and the next renaming, this time to Bishkek, it became the capital, first of the Kirghiz SSR, and then of sovereign Kyrgyzstan.
