Shortly after the seizure of power in Russia by the Bolsheviks in late 1917, Lenin established a new secret police organization to consolidate power through terror. Known as the Cheka (or All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage, VChk), it confiscated private property, arrested and murdered thousands of Russian citizens, built concentration camps and operated completely outside the rule of law, answering to no one. Quickly, as the Cheka grew to a 250,000 man organization, terror and oppression became a daily fact of life for Russians on a scale not seen since 16th century repression by Ivan the Terrible.
The Cheka's ruthlessness reflected the personality of its leader, Feliks Dzerzhinsky. A revolutionary born in Lithuania in 1877, Dzerzhinsky spent more than half of his life in Russian prisons before ascending to the role of terrormaster for the new Soviet state. His tireless commitment to the job earned him the nickname "Iron Feliks." Dzerzhinsky himself created numerous torture techniques in an effort to find the most efficient means of extracting information from those unfortunate enough to find themselves in a Cheka prison. He stated in 1918, "I think our apparat is one of the most effective. Its ramifications reach everywhere. The people respect it. The people fear it."
For Dzerzhinsky, terror was a positive, utopian act designed to purify society of counter-revolutionary elements. As Trotsky said, "We were never concerned with the Kantian-priestly and vegetarian-Quaker prattle about the 'sacredness of human life'. We were revolutionaries in opposition, and have remained revolutionaries in power. To make the individual sacred, we must destroy the social order which crucifies him. And that problem can only be solved by blood and iron." For the Soviet revolutionaries, "blood and iron" was the price of a new society, and a new type of Soviet Man - an individual who fully and willingly accepts his role solely as an instrument of the state.
The Cheka was succeeded by several organizations that served the same role, but operated with different names, eventually becoming the notorious KGB in 1954.
A statue of Dzerzhinsky was erected in 1958 in Lubianka Square (at the time Dzerzhinsky Square, renamed in 1926 after his death) in front of KGB headquarters - an imposing stone reminder of the "Red Terror" that helped create the USSR. In a remarkable symbolic act of liberation, a crowd of 15,000 protestors (with some help from a U.S. Embassy crane) tore down the statue in 1991 during the collapse of the Soviet republic.
The story, as written in the Moscow Times:
"I think it was good that this energy eventually focused on the monument," said Konstantin Borovoi, then head of the Russian Raw Materials and Commodities Exchange. He brought 2,000 brokers to the White House victory bash.
According to some reports, there were about 1,200 KGB staffers inside the headquarters at the time.
Borovoi said he was one of about 15,000 protesters at the monument.
The imposing Dzerzhinsky, in his silent, unwavering tribute to the KGB's power, only seemed to intensify the crowd's rage.
At about 5 p.m., people began scaling the statue, tying rope around it in hopes of pulling it down with a truck.
"I remember sitting on the lane near the pedestal, watching some guys climbing on the monument, clinging it with ropes," said Boris Belenkin of Memorial. The statue "swayed slightly but remained standing. It looked pretty dangerous, given there was an underpass and metro underneath."
Borovoi called Deputy Mayor Sergei Stankevich to ask for equipment to bring the statue down "in a civilized way," but Stankevich refused to deal with what he called a drunken crowd.
Moscow Mayor Gavriil Popov, in a book describing the days around the coup, said he finally caved in to the crowd, fearing they would riot.
But he was faced with a problem that only the U.S. Embassy could resolve.
"It turned out that it could not be thrown onto the ground. The metro and underpasses were underneath," Popov wrote in "In Opposition Again."
"We failed to find the equipment with the needed capacity," he said. "The U.S. Embassy offered help. They had construction going on on the embassy's grounds and had the crane we needed."
The borrowed crane arrived at about midnight. Nikolai Amelin, a street sweeper, was lifted to the top of the 20-meter statue. He tied a cable around the statue's neck.
The crane raised Feliks off the pedestal, the body swinging in what looked like a hangman's noose. The crowd broke out in loud cheers and applause.
Then the statue - which had been erected in 1958 at the height of Nikita Khrushchev's reign - was trucked off to a backyard for forgotten Soviet-era monuments near the Central House of Artists, where it remains to this day.
Regrettably, contemporary Russian leaders - perhaps in a misguided effort to glorify Russia's past - have maintained an admiration for the Cheka and Dzerzhinsky.
Boris Yeltsin, while president of Russia in 1997, celebrated the 80th anniversary of the Russian/Soviet secret police in a radio address that described Dzerzhinsky uncritically and referred to the KGB succeeding Federal Security Service (FSB) as "our chekists." Dzerzhinsky was the only revolutionary era Soviet figure not to have been officially discredited by Yeltsin's government. The FSB uses Cheka symbolism today and internally, like Yeltsin, refers to its officers as "chekists."
Recently, Russian president Vladimir Putin has allowed the FSB to produce a calendar commemorating major dates in Cheka/NKVD/KGB history that includes an image of pre-1991 Lubianka Square with the Dzerzhinsky statue in place as its cover. More alarming are reports that the secret police now play a greater role in Russian politics than any time since 1991, and that Putin is eager to expand their power. Putin is a former KGB agent, and ran the FSB for a year before being appointed prime minister by Yeltsin. He is also reported to have had a bust of Dzerzhinsky on his desk.
Meanwhile, Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov is pushing for the restoration of the statue that protestors tore down eleven years ago. Luzhkov will run for a third term in December, and some political strategists suggest that his support of restoring the statue may be a play for the votes of elderly Moscow citizens who maintain nostalgia for the Soviet regime. Another theory suggests that Luzhkov believes that restoring the statue will earn him favor with President Putin. Regardless, the effort has outraged human rights and pro-liberty groups in Russia as a dangerous reversal of democratic advances in the last ten years.
21.10.2002 © ljr