After originally being removed in 1997, a replica statue of "Iron Felix" Dzerzhinsky, has now been placed outside the headquarters of Russia's foreign spy service.
EXPERT PERSPECTIVE — The recent dedication of a copy of a statue of the founder of the Soviet state security services, Feliks Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky that was originally erected in front of the Lubyanka HQs of the KGB in 1958, now stands over the Yasenovo HQs compound of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) as the latest chapter in a lengthy and ongoing rehabilitation of the man known as “Iron Feliks”.
The August 1991 toppling by celebratory crowds of the original towering bronze statue of Dzerzhinsky from its plinth in Moscow’s Lubyanka Square and its banishment to a remote location in Moscow’s Muzeon Park amidst other statuary detritus of the Soviet era, was seen at the time as a hopeful sign that Russia could begin to come to terms with the murderous totalitarian past he embodied.
There were other indications in the immediate wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse that change might be possible. Limited access to select KGB archives was briefly allowed. And, in an act that earned him the ever-lasting opprobrium of KGB veterans, that last Chairman of that service, Vadim Bakatin, passed the plans for the bugging of the new US Embassy in Moscow to Ambassador Robert Strauss.
The KGB itself was broken up into several separate services and many of its officers - Vladimir Putin among them - left to try to make their way as ‘biznesmen” or to insinuate themselves into the entourages of the men of standing in the ‘New Russia’.
Bitterly angry and resentful over the collapse of Soviet power, the demise of their service to which they’d sworn allegiance and their concurrent loss of ‘elite’ status, KGB veterans bided their time waiting for – and helping ensure that - the tides of democratic change sweeping the country ebbed in a wave of disappointment. They kept their heads down, maintained contacts with the services that succeeded the KGB and built spider webs of influence intended to at once enrich themselves while reasserting the power and reach of the security and intelligence apparat in the emerging Russian state.
At the same time, they sought to deny the actual history of those institutions. Central to that denial was a calculated obfuscation of the true nature and legacy of Dzerzhinsky and the organization he founded.
Dzerzhinsky himself was brutally frank about the essence of the so-called “All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combatting Counterrevolution and Sabotage”, or “Cheka”.
“We”, Dzerzhinsky said, “stand for organized terror; this should be frankly admitted. “Terror”, he continued, “is an absolute necessity during times of revolution. Our aim is to fight against the enemies of the Soviet government”.
Although he was the son of ethnic Polish parents of noble heritage and a relative late-comer to Bolshevik movement, (he did not join the Party until 1917) Dzerzhinsky showed himself to be one of Lenin’s most reliable and ruthless acolytes. His “Chekists” unleashed merciless waves of terror against those labelled ‘counter-revolutionaries’ or ‘saboteurs’, shooting and imprisoning tens of thousands without trial.
In so doing, they put in place a regime of fear that was the centerpiece of the Soviet state. True to that ethos, the string of Soviet security and intelligence organizations known by a series of banally terrifying acronyms - ranging from the OGPU, though the NKVD, NKGB and MGB to the KGB - that succeeded the Cheka bloodily pursued, persecuted and slaughtered countless enemies real, contrived and imagined.
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What was to become a carefully curated cult of Dzerzhinsky took root almost immediately upon his death in 1926. Eulogized by Stalin as "a devout knight of the proletariat” and buried in a place of honor in the Kremlin wall, Dzerzhinsky’s name and grim visage would become ubiquitous across the breadth of the Soviet Empire as intended reminders of the awesome capacity of the state security organs to force acquiescence in the rule of, if not loyalty to, the Party and regime. Postage stamps, factories, schools, cities and towns bore his name. Statues of Dzerzhinsky identical, or similar, to that in front of the Lubyanka were emplaced in locations across the Soviet Union and its client states.
Reverence for Dzerzhinsky took on a quasi-religious quality in the Soviet intelligence and security services.
The day on which the Cheka was founded; 20 December 1917, was celebrated annually by Soviet security and intelligence personnel - usually with much drink - as “Cheka Day”. Those officers were paid on the twentieth of each month. Dzerzhinsky’s maxims preaching incorruptible fealty to party and state took on the tenor of holy commandments and were inculcated into all Soviet intelligence and security trainees, a practice that continues to this day.
Russian Foreign Intelligence Director Sergey Naryshkin spoke to this during the dedication of the statue at his HQs. Paraphrasing one of Dzerzhinsky’s best-known dictums, the SVR Chief proclaimed that “his winged words that only a person with a cool head, a warm heart and clean hands can become a security officer have become a significant moral guideline for several generations of employees of the security agencies of our country”.
The totems of this worship of Dzerzhinsky’s memory were commonplace in the KGB and allied services. A look around my office at souvenirs I picked up during what a colleague called “our Cold War victory tour” of Russia reveals some of the Dzerzhinsky iconography of that period. There are several busts of him; a portrait of him that once hung in an MVD building; pins bearing his likeness; and a coin with his image on it given by the East German Stasi to one of its own ‘in recognition of the fulfillment of Chekist’s duty”.
Such items should, with the collapse of the Soviet state, have become little more than the remains of a discredited regime. That this was not the case is largely ascribable to the inability of the Russian state to undertake a reckoning with its Communist past akin to that which took place in Eastern Europe and to the ability of KGB veterans to secure positions of power and influence in post-Soviet Russia.
Indeed, within the cloistered walls of the Russian intelligence and security services that succeeded the KGB, veneration of Dzerzhinsky never ceased. In the FSB’s Lubyanka HQs, flowers were still placed daily at the base of his bust. The Museum within that same building continued to feature a reproduction of Dzerzhinsky’s office, complete with a polish-language copy of ‘Das Kapital’ atop his desk.
Almost immediately following its removal, Russian Communists and KGB veterans began to push for a restoration of the “Iron Feliks” statue to its place in Lubyanka Square. But the post-Soviet rehabilitation of Dzerzhinsky gained its main impetus with Putin’s rise to power.
First as Director of the FSB and since then, as alternately Russian President and Prime Minster, Putin has repeatedly spoken of the officers of the modern Russian security and intelligence services as the proud inheritors of a storied history of their Soviet predecessors. While he has been careful to denounce the most-infamous actions of those earlier services such as Stalin’s Great Terror, Putin has promulgated a white-washed version or the past that is clearly intended to provide a false patina that sanctifies the base and dishonorable acts of Chekists past and present.
Over the past two decades, the Kremlin has sought to resurrect and re-cast Dzerzhinsky as an apostle of Russian patriotic and anti-western virtue, enshrining him as a symbol of order and national strength that stands in sharp contrast to the chaos and weakness that enveloped the country in the 1990’s; a period with profound impact on Putin’s worldview.
A gradual rehabilitation of Dzerzhinsky has, accordingly, proceeded apace under his rule. In 2005, a bust of Dzerzhinsky that had been removed from the Moscow Police HQs was re-installed. In 2006, the Military Academy in Minsk, Belarus dedicated a 10-foot replica of the “Iron Feliks” statue. In 2014, Putin signed a decree restoring the name Dzerzhinsky Division to the unit responsible for protecting the Russian leadership. In 2017, on 140th anniversary of Dzerzhinsky's birth, a monument to him was erected in Ryazan, Russia. And on the same day four years later, busts of him were unveiled in Krasnodar and Russia and Simferopol in Crimea.
None of this is surprising given Putin’s background. Indeed, from the outset of his more than two decades long rule of Russia, he has presided over what is, in effect, a Chekist state.
Surrounding himself with such fellow KGB old-timers as Nikolai Patrushev, Aleksandr Bortnikov and Sergey Ivanov, Putin has regularly and increasingly engaged in actions with which Dzerzhinsky would be quite familiar and comfortable, to include suppression of free speech, the crushing of political opposition, assassination and launching a war of aggression against a neighboring state.
Moreover, as Putin’s instructions to his security services on the 2022 incarnation of Cheka Day (now known as Special Services Day) – that they should act to strengthen defense of Russia’s borders, exercise greater control over society and root out “traitors, spies and saboteurs” – would indicate that there appears to be no prospect that his propensity towards ever increasing reliance on the security services as the principal and preferred instruments of state power, will abate.
It is an actuarial certainty that Putin and his coterie Cold War Chekists currently ruling Russia will soon pass from the scene. While a change in direction for the country at that time is always possible, given the increasing internal repression necessary for Moscow to continue waging its seemingly interminable war against Ukraine, it is likely those who succeed them will come from the same security state milieu and consequently, be imbued with the same authoritarian mindset and stilted understanding of the past. It is likewise probable that before any such generational change occurs, Putin’s latter-day Chekists will have long since long since achieved the resurrection of evil by re-consecrating “Iron Feliks” in his old spot in front of the Lubyanka.
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