Mikhail Vasilyevich Frunze was a Soviet revolutionary, politician, army officer and military theorist. Born to a Bessarabian father and a Russian mother in Russian Turkestan, Frunze attended the Saint Petersburg Polytechnical University and became an active member of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). Following the RSDLP ideological split, he sided with Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik faction. He led the textile workers strike in Ivanovo during the 1905 Russian Revolution, for which he was later sentenced to death before being commuted to life-long hard labour in Siberia. He escaped ten years later and took active part in the 1917 February Revolution in Minsk and the October Revolution in Moscow.

Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University, abbreviated as SPbPU, is a public technical university located in Saint Petersburg, Russia. The university houses one of the country's most advanced research labs in hydro–aerodynamics. The university's alumni include Nobel Prize winners, such as Pyotr Kapitsa and Zhores Alferov, physicists and atomic weapon designers such as Yulii Khariton, Nikolay Dukhov, Abram Ioffe, Aleksandr Leipunskii, and Yakov Zeldovich, aircraft designers and aerospace engineers, such as Yulii Khariton, Oleg Antonov, Nikolai Polikarpov, and Georgy Beriev, and chess grandmasters, such as David Bronstein. The university offers academic programs at the Bachelor, Master's, and Doctorate degree levels. SPbSPU consists of structural units called Institutes divided into three categories: Engineering Institutes, Physical Institutes, and Economics and Humanities Institutes. In 2022, the university was ranked #301 in the world in the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings, #393 in QS World University Rankings, #679 in Best Global Universities Rankings by U.S. News & World Report, and #1,005 by Center for World University Rankings.