Introduction
It may be thought odd by some to devote a lengthy
post to the head of the Cheka, a man noted for his ruthless behaviour,
especially in these difficult times when Russia is again pursuing its
imperialist agenda in Ukraine. I began
compiling this post before the full-scale invasion in February 2022 and since
then have become increasingly concerned some readers may interpret it as
indicating a positive attitude towards the current Russian regime and its
actions.
It is worth pointing out that interest in
an individual does not necessarily mean one endorses his or her views and
actions (if such were the case, many biographies would find few readers). Dzerzhinsky was a fascinating man, but his
flaws are obvious, and collecting information about him should not be taken as
a defence, nor a reflection of my political sympathies.
In happier times I count myself a
Russophile, but the war appals and distresses me, as it should any right-minded
person. Over the years I have attended
events arranged by the Ukrainian Studies department at the University of
Cambridge, occasionally reporting on the annual Cambridge Ukrainian film
festival, so my attitude towards Ukraine should be clear; writing about Iron
Felix does not mean I feel less keenly the suffering of its people.
17 April 2023
The Death of Felix Dzerzhinsky
I have long had an interest in Felix
Dzerzhinsky (1877-1926); in 2008 I was photographed next to his statue in Minsk,
Belarus, then earlier this year standing by his grave at the Kremlin wall near
Lenin’s Mausoleum (the plaque marking the final resting place of the remains of
Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s widow, is just visible on the left, between the
trees). So I was intrigued by the title
of a talk, given on 15 November 2016 at the University of Cambridge Centre for
Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities by Iain Lauchlan of the
University of Edinburgh in the series ‘Conspiracy & Democracy’, called ‘Conspiracy
in the Kremlin: Who (or what) killed Felix Dzerzhinsky’.
‘Iron Felix’ is best known for his role in
the Soviet revolutionary government as head of the All-Russian Extraordinary
Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, better known as the
Cheka, though he was also appointed Commissar for Internal Affairs which I
suppose would be the equivalent of the British Home Secretary also being head
of MI5. Trusted by Lenin, he was ruthless
in pursuing counter-revolutionaries and other enemies of the Bolsheviks.
 |
| Minsk, 2008. Photo: Keith Ruffles |
Operating in ways not unlike those of the old Tsarist Okhrana, his approach was not above criticism: Victor Serge argued that a transparent system would have achieved its results as efficiently, but with more justice. Dzerzhinsky on the other hand felt this was a life-or-death struggle and half measures could lead to disaster. As Lauchlan put it in noting how dependable Dzerzhinsky was, if you had to break eggs to make an omelette, Dzerzhinsky was a man who could be relied on to break them honestly. It was a position that could attract a sadist who might go beyond what was necessary whereas he did not like the job so would not use it for personal gratification. His colleagues did not feel his methods were excessive.
Dzerzhinsky died in the Kremlin in
mysterious circumstances and rumours swirled around his death immediately,
particularly in the foreign and émigré press, his sudden demise used by opponents
of the regime to suggest it was a sign of internal dissension. There was a Russian tradition of violence in
the Kremlin, notably Ivan the Terrible killing his son in 1581, and by evoking
that murderous history Dzerzhinsky’s death was bound to create conspiracy
theories.
 |
| Moscow, 2016. Photo: Karen Ruffles |
The suspicion arose that the regime was encountering its Thermidor, a parallel with the situation in France when the Reign of Terror was brought to an end in 1794 and its leading light, Robespierre, guillotined. By this interpretation Dzerzhinsky was the Soviet Robespierre and his death represented the government, post-Lenin, in crisis (more positively it could have been interpreted as the often arbitrary repression he represented easing as the government stabilised under the New Economic Policy, but from an anti-Bolshevik perspective it made sense to accentuate negative interpretations).
There were a number of colleagues who
could have wanted Dzerzhinsky out of the way, representing a variety of shades
of opinion. Suspects included Trotsky,
Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin. They had
all had areas of disagreement with their late comrade. However, Lauchlan emphasised firstly that
Dzerzhinsky argued with both wings, putting him in the middle; and while he
disagreed on some things, equally he agreed on others. There was no single aspect of policy which
might want someone to have him killed.
Significantly, Stalin was not mentioned at
the time as a moving force in a possible murder. Nor did Stalin accuse any of those he
eliminated later of having orchestrated Dzerzhinsky’s death when he could
easily have done so, though Lauchlan did mention that Stalin had planned to
include the possibility of his murder as part of the allegations in the Doctors’
Plot shortly before his own death.
Stalin was capable of accusing others of acts he had authorised, so it
would have been easy for him to point the finger, even if evidence was lacking
or had to be manufactured. Later a
rumour circulated that Stalin had had Dzerzhinsky killed because as head of the
Cheka the latter had uncovered evidence Stalin had once been an Okhrana agent,
though this turned out to be baseless.
So if accusations of a conspiracy were
lacking in 1926, why did they emerge later?
Lauchlan argued that it is easy to interpret history backwards, reading
motives into events retrospectively because we know what takes place next. Further, history can become a kind of soap
opera in which everything occurs for a reason.
Properly constructed drama does not allow for random forces, it requires
motivated individual acts. From that
point of view it is easier to see Dzerzhinsky’s death as part of a wider scheme
than acknowledge he just dropped dead from a heart attack.
There were a number of deaths in the
senior Soviet hierarchy in the 1920s and 30s which happened at opportune
moments, and if one thinks in terms of conspiracies then these could be
regarded not as coincidences but acts by the state to purge dissent. However, Lauchlan’s view is that Stalin’s
paranoia only developed after the suicide of his wife in 1932, after which he
gradually became insular within a limited clique. By the time of Sergei Kirov’s murder in 1934
he was ready to implicate a wide range of rivals, and order purges using the
pretext of a widespread conspiracy. The
political landscape was entirely different to that of 1926, when Stalin had
walked with other leading Bolsheviks behind Dzerzhinsky’s coffin.
Assuming Dzerzhinsky’s death was from
natural causes, what more can we say about the man? For Lauchlan this touches on leadership as performance
(curiously Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, who happened to be in Moscow at
the time, attended his funeral). With
his distinctive beard and sinister reputation, Dzerzhinsky consciously
projected himself as a Mephistophelean character. He admired Robespierre, and saw himself in the
same heroic mould.
In pursuit of that image and harbouring a
feeling of having a higher purpose, it looks like he had a death wish. He was not averse to putting himself in
dangerous situations and despite a history of ill-health, including previous
heart attacks, he effectively worked himself into an early grave, ignoring
doctors’ advice to slow down. He perhaps
saw himself as a secular saint, sacrificing himself for the revolution, and
there is a remarkable group photo, suppressed until the 1990s, with him in the
centre which echoes The Last Supper;
he even appears to have a halo behind his head.
It may be relevant that as a youth he had at one point intended to enter
a seminary.
Lauchlan outlined a possible cause for
this sense Dzerzhinsky possessed that he was somehow destined to
martyrdom. He had had tuberculosis in
1901 which inculcated in him the feeling he was between life and death, engaged
in a superhuman struggle with the enemy within, just as he struggled against
another kind of enemy within as head of the Cheka. He wanted his life to have meaning, but
turned the desire in a pathological direction.
The irony is that after his death an autopsy, conducted by the foremost
authority on TB in the country, revealed no trace of the disease – a conclusion
there was no reason to fabricate.
Dzerzhinsky had based his approach to life on a false premise.
For all his faults, Dzerzhinsky created an
iconic role model that endures today. He
is still popular in Russia at both official and public levels as a symbol of
integrity, and there is a movement to bring his statue, pulled down in 1991 and
currently languishing in the fallen statue park at the Central House of
Artists, back to its original position outside the Lubyanka. He is not so popular in Poland (he was an
ethnic Pole) and his statue in Dzerzhinsky Square in Warsaw came down in 1989,
the square given back its pre-war name.
As the existence of a statue in Belarus attests, the authorities there
are quite positive towards his legacy.
The lecture’s title was somewhat misleading
in emphasising the ‘who’ over the ‘what’.
One was expecting a surprise contender for Dzerzhinsky’s assassin,
perhaps a name hidden in state archives for decades, so it was a slight
anti-climax to learn he did actually die of a heart attack after all. That is an indication of our hankering after
conspiracies, life as soap opera.
Despite the disappointment it was still an interesting profile, showing
there was more to Dzerzhinsky, and greater nuance, than is suggested by his
image as director of the brutal state security apparatus. Dr Lauchlan has a biography in press – Iron Felix: Death, Tyranny & the Pursuit
of Happiness in Revolutionary Russia, 1877-1926 – which will be well worth
a look.
18 November 2016
Update 18 September 2017: Dzerzhinsky in Kirov
I
have expressed a rather optimistic interest in visiting all of the statues of
Felix Dzerzhinsky in existence, of which apparently there are a couple of dozen
across Russia, but now I find there is another to add to the list. On 5
September a new statue was unveiled in the Russian city of Kirov (named after
the Leningrad party boss who was assassinated in 1934), some 500 miles east of
Moscow. An imposing 8 ft 6 in. tall and weighing 2 tons, it stands in the
courtyard of the regional FSB veterans’ association which, while it’s not
exactly the Lubyanka, is an appropriate spot. There is a short YouTube
video of the unveiling, with the laying of many flowers at his feet, and a fine
statue it looks, Felix standing erect and proud as if he was still set to
defend the Revolution from its class enemies.
Kirov
may seem an unlikely spot, but the project was the initiative of a group of
local FSB ‘veterans’, supported by labour organisations in the area. The
statue was paid for by private donations, though the city was happy for it to
be erected, with a strong majority in favour on the local council. There
was already a commemorative plaque to Dzerzhinsky on the veterans’ association
building and the addition of a statue was the culmination of a long campaign.
The ostensible reason for the location – that Dzerzhinsky twice visited
the city, in 1898 and 1919, when it was known as Vyatka – seems somewhat weak,
but the sponsors needed some kind of justification, and they go on in more
general terms to praise Felix’s positive contribution to ’the struggle for
mankind’s bright future’, as Viktor Kolpakov, the director of the regional FSB
veterans’ association, said to the city’s council. To be fair Dzerzhinsky
did stay, with Stalin, in the building which now houses the association while
in town during the Civil War.
The
new statue has been getting some coverage: Ben Macintyre wrote an article in Saturday’s
Times with the alarmist title ‘Lenin’s architect of red terror rises
again: Decades after Soviet statues were destroyed it is chilling to see Putin
put up a new one of Felix Dzerzhinsky’. While it is a little unfair to
lay this directly at the desk of Mr Putin, it is doubtful it would have
happened had he been opposed to the idea, and it is reasonable to assume Putin
would have sympathy for Dzerzhinsky’s methods from the days when you didn’t
have to bother pretending to be democratic.
Also
on Saturday, Radio 4’s ‘Archive on 4’ programme was devoted the current fashion
for tearing down statutes that embody values now considered offensive,
including those commemorating Confederate leaders in the United States and the
mass slaughter of Lenins in Ukraine. Kirov was given as an unusual
counter-example bucking the trend, but of course it shows that if there is a
sufficiently strong fan base and limited opposition, you can memorialise
anyone. There are critics in Kirov, such as relatives of those who
suffered under the Soviet regime, feeling much the same as people elsewhere for
whom such statues are unwelcome reminders of dark times, but their opinions
count for little compared to FSB veterans’.
Update 26 May 2018: Dzerzhinsky in Sofia
On a recent trip to Sofia I visited the Museum of Socialist
Art, or the Gallery of Totalitarian Art as some of the literature describes it,
though in Bulgarian it is clearly the former: Музей на социалистическото
изкуство. It is part of the National Art
Gallery and was founded in 2011. Located
in the suburbs, it is tucked behind the National Investigation Service, next to
a large shopping centre, and is noticeable from the road mainly because of the
large red star at the front which once graced the Communist Party HQ in the
city. Appropriately the museum is just
round the corner from the G. M. Dimitrov metro station, named after Georgi
Dimitrov, the first communist leader of Bulgaria from 1946-49.
Its remit is to collect art from 1944 to 1989, i.e. the period
of Soviet domination. The ‘Totalitarian
Art’ title was apparently the name initially proposed but discarded officially,
though clearly not in some people’s minds, in favour of ‘Socialist’. The word totalitarian is a misnomer as the
institution’s remit does not cover the period 1941-44, but then on a casual
visit to the country one would be forgiven for not realising Bulgaria had been
allied to Germany during the war, and probably little evidence of that dark
embarrassing period remains in the country.
 |
| Sofia, 2018. Photo: Karen Ruffles |
Outside the museum building there is, as in Memento Park, Budapest but on a smaller scale, a collection of sculpture on display: a mixture of heroic statuary and small pieces of individuals, and to a lesser extent idealised interpretations of the masses they were supposed to represent. I was pleasantly surprised to find at the end of a path a modest bust of Dzerzhinsky. According to the plate attached to the plinth it had been carved by Vassil Pissanov in 1924. Prior to its relocation to Sofia had been in the Petko Churchuliev art gallery in Dimitrovgrad, a new town established in 1947 and named after guess who. Presumably it was a gift from Russia at that time, but the plate did not say where it had been between 1924 and the establishment of the People’s Republic of Bulgaria. Naturally Felix and I posed together for a photo opportunity. The visit to the museum was enjoyable, though there was less inside than I had hoped and apart from a 20-minute newsreel compilation no context whatsoever, but finding the bust of Dzerzhinsky more than compensated.
Update 23 August 2022: Dzerzhinsky on film
Recently I saw for sale a vintage film poster (which I didn’t
buy) advertising a film in which Felix Dzerzhinsky features heavily. It is a Soviet film, ВИХРИ ВРАЖДЕБНЫЕ, which
translates as Hostile Whirlwinds, though it seems it was also called
simply Felix Dzerzhinsky. The
title is drawn from the opening of the Polish revolutionary song Warszawianka,
later adapted in Russian as Varshavianka. The biopic, attractively shot in colour, is
available on YouTube but alas does not have subtitles, and my Russian is not
good enough to keep up with the dialogue.
 |
| ВИХРИ ВРАЖДЕБНЫЕ |
Going by what I can gather from secondary sources, it covers
the first few years of the new regime and a busy Dzerzhinsky, played by
Vladimir Yemelyanovm, is shown as head of the Cheka sorting out various
problems: besting the Left Social Revolutionaries, disarming anarchists,
foiling the Lockhart Plot, restoring the railway network, and helping homeless
children, thereby making converts who go on to work at the Yugostal plant in
Ukraine where saboteurs are in evidence.
The film was directed by Mikhail Kalatozov at Mosfilm, and
the screenwriter was Nikolai Pogodin.
The production had a troubled history.
It was finished after Stalin’s death in 1953, but shelved and not
released in the Soviet Union until 1956 with references to Stalin, played by
Mikhail Gelovani, excised (though I spotted Trotsky walking out of a hall
during a fiery speech Dzerzhinsky was giving).
The poster artist was the prolific Boris Zelensky.
Update 10 November 2022: Loss of Dzerzhinsky bust in Omsk,
Siberia
My aim to visit all the extant statues of Dzerzhinsky has
suffered a blow. Well, of course it had
already suffered a blow when Russia again invaded Ukraine in February 2022, an
act which has greatly reduced the likelihood of my return to Russia. But now another has occurred.
On 8 November 2022, the Belarusian media outlet Nexta
reported that: ‘In #Omsk, unknown persons demolished a monument to Chekist
Felix #Dzerzhinsky.’ They do not say how they know it was smashed rather than
stolen. Before-and-after photographs
showed the bust was gone and the plinth had been damaged.
Judging by the three photographs, the bust was uncared for in
recent times. The first shows
Dzerzhinsky in good shape, a red rose resting on the plinth. In the second he looks scruffy, surrounding
vegetation has grown higher, and the tiles surfacing the plinth are
loosening. The third photograph shows
the end of a progression of neglect.
So unless the bust is missing rather than destroyed and is
returned, which seems unlikely, I can cross Omsk off my list. There is an attractive park there named after
Dzerzhinsky, who spent time in the city in early 1922 organising food
transport, but that does not provide a strong enough reason to make the
journey.
Update 16 January 2023: Dzerzhinsky memorabilia
As well as the large-scale busts, Dzerzhinsky’s features were
turned into a range of ornaments, of varying materials and quality, suitable
for household display. These
occasionally come up for sale, and I keep an eye out for photographs of
examples; I don’t think I am ready to build a collection of the objects
themselves to adorn my mantlepiece, though they would make an unusual talking
point.
Contextual information is invariably missing, but presumably
the bulk of these were made to commemorate his death, or an anniversary of
it. They raise questions of who made
them, in what quantities, and what the market was: did people purchase them
because they were sad to lose such a highly-valued member of the regime and
fancied having a memento; or did they feel obliged to display them in order to
demonstrate their loyalty to the Party?
How often were busts of other minor Bolshevik leaders produced, or was
Felix a special case?
While one door may have closed – the vanished Dzerzhinsky in
Omsk – another has opened, for news has belatedly reached me that, going
against the flow of history, a bust of Dzerzhinsky was erected in Hanoi in
2017. It resides, unsurprisingly, outside
the People's Police Academy.
BBC News Vietnam carried a report, with a photograph of the
unveiling ceremony, which took place on 20 January 2017. As well as local police representatives there
were attendees from the Russian Embassy and Russian Cultural Centre.
The article provides a potted biography and character
analysis culled from the Encyclopedia Britannica and other commentators, noting
Dzerzhinsky’s patchy reputation since 1989: more positive in Russia than in
Poland. It concludes by mentioning (with
a photo) the statue removed from outside the Lubyanka in 1991 and the calls by
some for its restoration.
What makes the event in Hanoi even curiouser is the fact that
it was not the only memorial to Dzerzhinsky erected in 2017. As noted above, on 5 September a statue was unveiled
in Kirov at the instigation of the local FSB veterans. Clearly he was having a moment, perhaps
linked to the centenary of the Revolution.
One wonders what 2026, the centenary of his death, will bring.
Even with Felix enjoying a measure of support in Russia, the erection of a bust in Vietnam seems odd, as he had no personal connection to that country. Perhaps the police are sending a message to their population that they are ready to adopt his methods if necessary. One wonders, though, how much Hanoi’s residents know about him and the role he played in establishing the Bolshevik regime. Still, whatever the rationale, it’s a handsome bust.
Source: ‘Who is Mr. Dzerzhinsky whose statue was erected in
Vietnam?’, BBC News Tiếng Việt, 21 January 2017. https://www.bbc.com/vietnamese/world-38697777
(retrieved 1 February 2023).
Update 1 November 2023: Felix Dzerzhinsky back
in Moscow and Tver
There has been a fair bit of activity
recently in the field of Dzerzhinsky memorials, with new statues erected in
Moscow and Tver. Naturally, Moscow’s
made the bigger splash. I’ll deal with
these in turn.
1 Moscow
TASS reported that on 11 September 2023,
Dzerzhinsky’s birthday, a new bronze statue had been unveiled outside the
headquarters of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) in the Yasenevo district
in southern Moscow. Constructed by
sculptor Vladimir Ivanov, it is a copy, though smaller, of the statue designed
by Evgeniy Vuchetich that stood in Lubyanka Square from 1958 (its unveiling
attended by First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev) to August
1991. The original still resides in the
Muzeon Park of Arts, part of Gorky Park.
The SVR commissioned Ivanov to reproduce the original as closely as
possible, referring to Dzerzhinsky as ‘the knight of the revolution.’ There was already a Dzerzhinsky plaque inside
the building.
For some years previously there had been
agitation, including by the organisation of veterans of the army and state
security agencies, for the return of Vuchetich’s Dzerzhinsky’s statue from its
exile to its original location. In 2007
it was recognised as having ‘regional significance’, and it was cleaned of
graffiti in 2015. The 1991 removal was
declared illegal by the Moscow Prosecutor’s Office in 2021. A dry run for its restoration took place in
2005, when a bust of Dzerzhinsky was returned to the courtyard of the Moscow
Police headquarters. This too had been
removed following the failed coup in August 1991.
A vote took place in Moscow in February
2021 on a choice between two possible monuments to occupy the vacant space in
Lubyanka Square: either Dzerzhinsky or Alexander Nevsky, famed for his military
victories (think Battle on the Ice) and therefore a suitable patriotic
symbol. This would have presented a way
to reinstate Dzerzhinsky, and to do so with popular support. In the event, with nearly 320,000 ballots
cast and Nevsky leading by 55 percent to 45 percent, Sergei Sobyanin, mayor of
Moscow, cancelled the week-long online referendum after two days because he
felt that rather than unite opinion the issue was too divisive – meaning there
had been a backlash against Dzerzhinsky and what he represented.
The full-scale invasion of Ukraine, with
the emphasis on patriotism and a crackdown on the war’s opponents, tipped the
balance in favour of Dzerzhinsky’s return, though in a less contentious
location. It is a clear reminder of
Putin’s nostalgia for the status once enjoyed by the USSR and its centralised
control. Sergei Naryshkin, the SVR’s
director, said at the Yasenevo unveiling ceremony that Dzerzhinsky's face on
both the original and the new statue looks towards Poland and the Baltic
states, ‘because the threat to Russia from the northwest remains.’ He hailed Dzerzhinsky for his ‘crystal
honesty’ and ‘winged words that only a person with a cold 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.’ Clearly, Dzerzhinsky is
considered a role model for today’s agents.
Supporters of the new statue see him as a
symbol of order, or a ‘reconciliation with history.’ while opponents naturally
consider him a symbol of repression, in fact a message being sent by the
current regime to its critics, and would replace ‘warm heart and clean hands’
with alternative adjectives. Memorial,
which investigates human rights crimes during the Soviet period, noted that
‘the idea of restoring the Dzerzhinsky monument could only come to the mind
of a man completely devoid of conscience’ (the organisation was forcibly
dissolved in early 2022). Its erection
can be seen as a justification of Chekist methods for a new age.
There are two puzzling aspects to the
statue. The first is that it is out in
the suburbs, when it could have been given a more prominent position, perhaps
even where the original once stood, as a reminder of the continuity between the
old ways and the present regime. Its
location either betrays a certain ambivalence towards his legacy, even if some
aspects remain useful, or an understanding of quite how polarising a figure he
remains. The second is that it is
smaller than its predecessor. Perhaps
materials are scarce when there is a war on, and this is all the sponsors could
manage.
To do it properly, the new statue should
have been at least as big as the old one, to project self-confidence. Despite the director’s bullish words, the
result feels half-hearted. It could
though be an exercise in testing the water prior to the restoration of the
original, or a full-size replica, to its old Lubyanka site. The idea still has its proponents, despite the
2021 setback. Either way, offering the
ancient past as something new suggests a poverty of ideas, a system stuck in a
rut.
2 Tver
Tver, northwest of Moscow, also has a new
Dzerzhinsky, or at least a newly-installed one.
If the one in Moscow proved controversial, that in Tver is far more
so. It is part of a group recently placed
at the Mednoye memorial complex to supplement its ‘permanent exhibition’. The bust of Stalin is the most notable, and
there are also busts of Kalinin (who came from the region; from 1931 to 1990
the city of Tver was called Kalinin), Kirov and Voroshilov. In the middle of the row is a group sculpture
of Lenin flanked by Dzerzhinsky and Sverdlov.
The new exhibition opened on 19 October 2023, the 27th anniversary of
the creation of the complex.
What makes the move so puzzling is that
the complex is dedicated to the victims of the purges, and to the memory of
over six thousand Polish prisoners and others executed in the spring of
1940. Alexander Chunosov, the head of
the memorial complex, said the decision to install it was made by the State
Central Museum of Contemporary History of Russia in Moscow, from whose
collection the figures were drawn. By
contrast, in 2019 the regional authorities had ordered the removal of two
plaques from the complex which commemorated the victims of Stalin’s Great
Terror.
It seems Chunosov was left by the Moscow
museum to justify its act. He claimed the
figures were part of the narrative of repression and were not intended to
glorify the Soviet leadership, adding he saw nothing contradictory in the new
monuments, as he considered those depicted to be part of the process of
repression (the other side of the coin, as it were). He did not say why he thought their presence
added value to the memorial’s purpose, nor the effect it might have on those
who had been affected by that repression.
