It is a given that intelligence organizations, secret police operate outside most laws, moral and otherwise. Probably all have dark secrets that they wish to keep hidden, even in democracies. None, however have terrified their countries as have the KGB and the Gestapo.
Could you conceive the mayor of Berlin proposing the erection of a massive statue to Herman Göring, founder of the latter, in 2002? A very unlikely prospect.
But Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov, probably the second most popular man in Russia after Putin is proposing the equivalent - a massive memorial to Feliks Dzerzhinsky, also known as Iron Feliks, to be returned to Lubyanskaya Square in Moscow. And this issue was actually debated by politicians last Friday in Moscow. Many see this proposal as a way of honouring Putin, a “birthday present” as some opponents call it. Putin, himself a former KGB man and chief spy - at the FSB secret service, the organization that replaced the Soviet KGB - is turning 50 shortly.
The very word Lubyanka serves to send chills through a Russian’s spine. The massive, foreboding prison compound was one from which few returned. Dzerzhinsky has gone down in the annals of what is already a bloody history, of being one of the cruellest tyrants that ever served the state, from tsarist era to Soviet.
The typically Russian creation of an apparatus of fear to squelch any resistance to the Bolsheviks was the brain child of Lenin, but Dzerzhinsky was his willing acolyte. The October Revolution never had been a “popular” one, supported by a majority. Lenin had his hands full, opposition to Sovnarkom both abroad and at home convinced him that such a “special apparatus” needed creating, one that would “combat strikes by the bourgeoisie by the most energetic revolutionary measures”. Thus the Cheka - an acronym for an Extraordinary Commisson set up to combat counterrevolution and sabotage - was founded in December 20 1917, scant weeks after the October seizure of power. The Cheka’s first years were among the bloodiust in Soviet history. Stalin’s purges of the 1930’s succeeded because of the legacy of fear that was Iron Feliks.
Dzerzhinsky was the obvious choice to head the Cheka. He had in his adulthood never spent more than three years out of jail, either in his native Poland or in Tsarist Russia, in his own words, fighting as the “fiercest enemy of nationalism”. In his first years as the Cheka’s head he was not known to leave the Lubyanka, taking his meals there, sleeping in his office. Imprisoning, in a way, himself as well for the cause.
The cause is known. The methods? Seizure of property, resettlement, deprivation of ration cards (thus, food). The main weapon though was terror. Midnight arrests, public murders, lynchings, terrible beatings all meant that the Cheka was Lenin’s road to consolidating a regime of terror and horror. And the name Dzerzhinsky was equal to that of the Lubyanka, fear and terror of a human tied to a building and process.
Iron Feliks himself never lived long enough to experience Stalin and Beria’s rule. He died in 1926, but has gone into Soviet lore. Russians are known for their personality cults, Iron Feliks quickly became a KGB inspired “saint”. According to historian Christopher Andrew, more adulation was bestowed in his cult that the combined total given on all his successors - an embarrasingly (for the KGB) high proportion of whom are now acknowledged by Russians as major criminals. Busts, public statues, the list was long
Many must recall the powerful symbolism when along with the Soviet Union’s collapse hundreds of memorials and statutes of Lenin and other leaders were forcibly removed by demonstrators. The footage from Moscow of Dzerzhinsky’s monument being toppled in 1991 was repeatedly broadcast across the globe as a symbol of the collapse of communism, the demise of a system ruled by terror.
Moscow deputies debated returning the statue - and have local public support. More than 55% of recently polled Muscovites believe that Dzerzhinsky, as a historical personality “who fought crime and restored order” needs to be so honoured. It is well known that many Russians long for the security of the Soviet days.
Human rights organizations and most of the rest of the world are expressing disbelief. Iconography is a big thing in Russian culture; as icon of Red Terror Iron Feliks ranks up there with Stalin and Lenin. Liberal members of the Moscow Chamber of Deputies saw even raising the idea of restoring the statue as an insult to the memories of millions of innocent repressed Russians.
Is this a concrete, clear manifestation of which way things are moving in Russia? A time of returning to an era of authoritarianism and of secret services operating beyond the reach of authorities and the law?
Although much has been made of Putin’s predecessor Boris Yeltsin’s heavy handed, Soviet style ways of rule, Yeltsin at least blocked the reinstatement of any Soviet Symbols.
There is a morbid junkyard, a former park, that is littered with statutes of former Soviet greats removed by protestors. Among them is the original 14 ton Dzershinsky. They have not been destroyed. Why? No monuments should remain of that bloody era. Over 100,000 Russians signed a petition blocking the return of the monument.
A final point. Graves of Russians shot by the KGB and the Cheka continue to be unearthed in Russia’s countryside. Last month, outside of St. Petersburg a mass grave was found, experts say that there could be as many as 30,000 bodies there.
First Putin overturned Yeltsin’s stance, restoring powerful emblems including the Soviet-era anthem. Now Luzhkov and his statue as a gift for Tsar Volodya. What kind of a country is it that honours the worst killers in history? What may be expected next? Many Russians and people from countries freed from the Soviet yoke can do little, but shudder, yes from real fear.
English leader: Monumental morons
Arvamus
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