Felix Dzerzhinsky

Founder of the Soviet secret police

• Born: September 11, 1877
• Birthplace: Kojdanów, Russian Empire (now Dzyarzhynsk, Belarus)
• Died: July 20, 1926
• Place of death: Moscow, Soviet Union (now in Russia)

Cause of notoriety: Founder and head of the brutal Soviet secret police, Dzerzhinsky gathered agency after agency under his central control.

Active: 1917-1926

Locale: Soviet Union

Early Life

Felix Dzerzhinsky (FEE-lihks dyuhr-ZHEEN-skee) was born into a Polish noble family in the Russian Empire in 1877. He attended school in Vilnius, where he became associated with the Socialist movement. He became a founder of the Social Democratic Party of Lithuania and later helped found the Social Democratic Party of the kingdom of Poland and Lithuania along with Rosa Luxemburg. He was a Communist activist in the areas of Kowno and Warsaw from 1897 to 1899. In the early 1900’s, he began to gravitate toward the Russian Social Democratic Party, and by 1906 he was named a member of the Central Committee of the party. He then began to split his activities between St. Petersburg and Warsaw.

Dzerzhinsky was imprisoned frequently between 1908 and 1917. He spent eleven years in and out of prison or exile. In February of 1917 he was released from prison as part of a general amnesty. He became a loyal supporter and ally of Vladimir Ilich Lenin upon Lenin’s return to Russia in April, 1917. Dzerzhinsky was involved in the planning of the October Revolution, and for his efforts was elected to the Bolshevik Central Committee in August of 1917. He was to remain a member of the Central Committee from 1917 to 1926.

Political Career

Following the October Revolution, Lenin appointed Dzerzhinsky to head the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for to Combat Counterrevolution and Sabotage (Cheka, Vecheka, or the Soviet secret police). The Cheka was meant to be only a temporary creation until the revolution had stabilized society. It operated on the same organizational basis as the Okhrana, the czarist secret police, but incorporated the viciousness and cruelty of the Oprichnina, the secret police of Czar Ivan IV (Ivan the Terrible).

The Cheka operated as a state-within-the-state, using terror, fear, and torture as weapons against those who opposed the Bolshevik regime. Dzerzhinsky described the Cheka as an instrument for the settling of accounts with counterrevolutionaries. He described a Chekist as having a “warm heart, a cool head and clean hands.” He was chosen by Lenin because he was willing to sacrifice “anyone” in defense of the revolution. To him, all forms of torture were permissible, from the impaling of priests to the skinning alive of Socialist opponents. No forms of torture were beyond the pale in the settling of accounts.

What few restraints there were on the Cheka dissolved after the assassination of Moisei Uritskii, the Petrograd Party chief, and the attempted assassination of Lenin by Fanya Kaplan. Dzerzhinsky, released from his remaining fetters, let loose the “Red Terror.” Dzerzhinsky, who had began to see himself as the Robespierre of the Russian Revolution, would travel around Russia in an armored train, dispensing swift, inflexible “justice.” He presided over the executions of thousands of people.

In addition, the application of class terror was taken to a new extreme, and executions based on class origin became the norm. Mass arrests of wealthy or successful farmers (kulaks) were instituted, and concentration camps (precursors to the Gulags) were developed to detain family members of possible anti-Bolshevik partisans. Sweeping arrests of Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries were carried out under the premise that such elements were provoking the workers in Petrograd and Moscow. Zionists and Roman Catholics were also targeted. The appearance of legality was maintained as so-called kangaroo courts fabricated evidence. Dzerzhinsky instituted the process by which the condemned was forced to sign a confession just before he or she was executed.

Dzerzhinsky turned his attention to cleansing the military after the Kronstadt revolt of 1921. Thirty thousand soldiers and sailors were killed in crushing the military base revolt. The Cheka then began to penetrate every facet of daily life, in order to ensure the security of the state. By 1922, Lenin and Dzerzhinsky realized that the Cheka had gained a vile reputation for shedding as much innocent blood as guilty. In an attempt to assuage popular concerns, the Cheka in February of 1922 was renamed the State Political Directorate, or GPU. Nothing really changed except the name, which later became the Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU) and then the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD). Dzerzhinsky remained in charge of the secret police until his death in July of 1926.

Dzerzhinsky held many other political positions and accepted whatever task was given to him. In 1919, he was named commissar of internal affairs. During the Polish-Soviet War of 1920 he was appointed to the short-lived Polish Provisional Revolutionary Committee. He became people’s commissar of transport in 1921, thus putting all forms of transportation under Cheka supervision. In 1924, he became chairman of the Supreme Council of the National Economy, which focused on the rapid development of heavy industry.

Following Lenin’s death in 1924, Dzerzhinsky became a staunch supporter of Joseph Stalin, whom he had already started to move toward, ideologically. Dzerzhinsky was put in charge of the embalming of Lenin’s body and its placement in the Kremlin tomb. He became a virulent opponent of Nikolay Bukharin and Lev Kamenev, who were open to further decentralization of the economy. Like Stalin, Dzerzhinsky was a devoted centralist. He died from a sudden heart attack at the Fourteenth Party Congress in July of 1926. He received a hero’s burial at the Kremlin Wall. Stalin was later buried next to him.

Impact

As the person who implemented the Red Terror, Felix Dzerzhinsky was responsible for the deaths of thousands. He set the design of many future reincarnations of the Cheka, from the NKVD to the Committee for State Security (KGB) and its successor, the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB). He created what became known in the Soviet Union and Russia as the Siloviki, or higher police. The Siloviki under Dzerzhinsky infiltrated all aspects of Soviet society in order to control and manipulate the population. As of 2006, the FSB still had agents in all nongovernmental civic organizations, a policy the Vladimir Putin administration sought to restrict and in some cases outlaw. In any case, Dzerzhinsky and his legacy endured. It is no wonder that one of the first statues torn down in the 1989 revolution in Russia was that of Dzerzhinsky.

Bibliography

Andrew, Christopher. The Sword and Shield. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Gives a history of the Soviet and Russian secret police, from the founding of the Cheka to the FSB.

Conquest, Robert. The Great Terror. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Conquest is the authority on the Terror, in which Dzerzhinsky played a dominant role.

Kromova, C. Dzerzhinsky: A Biography. Moscow: Progress, 1988. A classic Soviet biography of the founder of the Cheka, portraying him as the great protector of the revolution and a hero.

Pipes, Richard. Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime. New York: Knopf, 1994. Pipes is an authority on the rise of the Bolsheviks. This book traces how Dzerzhinsky gathered committee after committee under the general control of the Cheka.