Originally published: National Humanities History, No. 11, 2016
On December 20, 1917, the All-Russian Council for the Suppression of Rebellion (Cheka) was established
The picture shows Dzerzhinsky
While visiting monuments in brest, a small town on the Polish-Belarusian border, I accidentally broke into the local Railway Science museum. On a pile of old steam locomotives left over from the Soviet era, nameplates such as "October Revolution", "Leningrad" and "Glory" are hung in turn. The only locomotive named after a figure features a picture of a middle-aged man with a goatee and a clear face in the center of the five-pointed star directly in front of the locomotive, and his name , "Felix Dzerzhinsky" — is written in white curved letters at the top.
The encounter with Dzerzhinsky on the Polish-Belarusian border is highly symbolic: the Polish nobleman was born at the height of the national self-determination movement, but chose to join the Russian Bolshevik Party and Soviet power, thus becoming an enemy of Piłsudski, an old acquaintance of his youth; a peace treaty signed in Brest in 1918 greatly affected the image of the Bolshevik Party in Russia, and Dzerzhinski was forced to direct the "Cheka" he had created into the purges of former allies and "class dissidents". The "Red Terror", which had been extremely influential; he had hoped that the Red Army's western expedition would spark a revolution throughout Europe, but after the defeat in Warsaw, he could only accept the reality that the "enemy" would exist for a long time and the secret police apparatus must also be permanent; and until his death, his birthplace of Ivijanez remained under the rule of the Polish Republic until 1945, when it was incorporated into the Soviet Union.
Tall, thin, with astonishing revolutionary zeal and enthusiasm for his work, Dzerzhinsky was called "Titifellix" by his comrades, Trotsky praised him for his "intrinsic honest character, enthusiastic personality and impulsive nature, and never corrupted by power", and lockhart, the British intelligence officer he arrested, considered him to have "the self-sacrificing spirit and ascetic colors of the Puritans and early Jesuits". He created an astonishing wave of terror in Russia out of idealism and practical necessity, but he was not a vicious butcher and sadist in himself. After the end of the civil war, he offered to control the scale of the repression and became a defender of the market line when he was in charge of the Supreme National Economic Council.
But Dzerzhinsky's creation did not follow the trajectory set by his "godfather". By the mid-1920s, the GEB, an expansion of the Cheka, had infiltrated every corner of Soviet state and social life, transforming it from an extraordinary institution into an everyday tool for the united communist (Brazzaville) system of governance. Even "Iron Felix" himself became a microcosm of this instrumentalization process: he complained that Lenin and Stalin did not regard him as a normal stateman, but only borrowed his men in black horses and thunderous means. The "Father of the Cheka" eventually died of illness the night before the party struggle escalated, thus saving his reputation. If he had lived until 1938, polish descent alone and contact with Trotsky would have been enough to bring him to death, and it would have been the NKVD, the latest name of the Cheka, to carry out the order.
Arrests are commonplace for him
On 11 September 1877, Felix Edmundović Dzerzhinsky was born into a polish aristocratic family in the Oshmiyan District of Wielno Province in the western part of the Empire (present-day Ivijanez, Minsk Oblast, Belarus). His father, Edmundo-Rufen Dzerzhinsky, graduated from St. Petersburg University and was a physics and mathematics teacher at a liberal arts secondary school in Taganrog; his maternal grandfather, Janusevic, was a university professor. When Felix was born, the elder Dzerzhinsky had only 5 years left to live due to tuberculosis, but the entire family's estate around Ivijanez was still intact. As a result, Dzerzhinsky received a good education from an early age, was fluent in Russian, Polish, Yiddish and Latin, and converted to Catholicism.
In 1887, Dzerzhinsky was admitted to the Russian Liberal Arts Secondary School in Wielno, where he received 8 years of secondary education. His diligence and dedication flattered his classmates, and he also attracted a senior, 10 years his senior, Joseph Piłsudski, who had been arrested several times for his anti-government activities. More than 40 years later, Piłsudski wrote in his memoirs: "As a teenager, Dzerzhinsky was tall, thin, serious, and his face was always expressionless, like an ascetic. He was a good, astute and humble student who never knew how to lie: this will be revealed in later history. ”
