You stand over a table of maps in a dim Kharkov command room, ink-stained fingers tracing the rail lines that feed the Donets. Winter mud seeps under the door. Reports say the counterrevolutionaries will rise at dawn in three towns along the junction—cut those rails, and their advance dies. You plan quickly; there is no time for speeches. You move like a man who learned the steppe’s silence in Pishpek. Small, mobile detachments will sever reinforcements; a feint from the north will draw their reserves; a concentrated strike at the bridge will split their column. Men you barely know will trust your orders because you speak plainly, and because you go where they must go. It is here, amid telegrams and the smell of cheap tobacco, that the name settles into the room like a promise: you are Mikhail Vasilyevich Frunze. The boy from Pishpek who read forbidden tracts at night, taught drills by day, and believes a disciplined plan can make revolution survive. You dispatch riders, mark rendezvous at ruined stations, and ride out to forward posts between Kharkov and the Donets. At those timbered outposts you learn what theory cannot teach—when morale cracks, give men bread; when fear rises, stand visibly at the front. Your tactics are simple and fierce: seize the rail junctions, hold the bridges, and disappear before the Whites can regroup. By dusk the first junctions are in Bolshevik hands. The enemy’s columns falter, their communications shredded. Soldiers—peasant, deserter, and worker alike—look to you not for glory, but for a route home. You give it to them: order, direction, a reason to hold. When the smoke clears, Kharkov hums again as supply trains roll through secured tracks. The Red Army asks for capable men; you answer. In 1918 you join its ranks—not for fame, but because the survival of the cause needs commanders who can bend chaos into strategy. Short, sharp, and forged in cold mud: this is where your command begins.