Opposition activists wield posters of (L-R) Hitler, Mussolini and Himmler, and former security chiefs: (L-R) Felix Dzerzhinsky, Lavrenty Beria and Vladimir Putin. AFP PHOTO / ANDREY SMIRNOV
The likely return of a statue of “Iron Felix” Dzerzhinsky, the first Soviet secret police chief, to the square once named after him reads as a sign of President Putin’s desire to rehabilitate the past to serve his future aims.
Felix Dzerzhinsky, a Polish aristocrat turned revolutionary, founded the Cheka, the “All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage” in 1917. The precursor of Stalin’s secret police and then the KGB, the Cheka was notorious for its brutal methods in the desperate days of the Russian Civil War. Nonetheless, Dzerzhinsky remains a hero to many veterans of the KGB, including Vladimir Putin.
Since 1958, his statue had stood in the middle of the square, since returned to its original name of Lubyanskaya, in front of the headquarters of the secret police. This building is still owned by the KGB’s post-Soviet successors, the Federal Security Service (FSB), although their main headquarters is in an anonymous modern office block off to the side of the square.
In August 1991, after a failed coup by hardliners trying to stop President Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms, a crowd toppled the 15-ton statue. It was then consigned to the Park of Fallen Monuments along with other remnants of Soviet iconography.
Since then, though, efforts have been made to rehabilitate Dzerzhinsky’s name and the Moscow City Council has decided to include his statue in a collection of monuments due to be restored at a cost of over 50 million rubles ($1.6 million) otherwise dominated by cultural figures such as writers Mikhail Lermontov and Alexander Herzen.
This is not the first time there have been such efforts; it was mooted in 2002 and then again in 2008. Those times it was vetoed by the Kremlin, but now it seems more likely to go ahead. The idea was backed by the pro-Putin United Russia bloc, the nationalist Liberal Democrats and the Communists, and on October 11, it was endorsed by deputy speaker of the Moscow City Assembly Andrei Metelsky.
To an extent, this reflects the continued recession of the Soviet era into history. Dzerzhinsky died in 1926 and opinion polls show that even brutal dictator Joseph Stalin’s reputation is actually improving.
However, it is also part of a deliberate campaign not just to continue to burnish the shine of the political police apparatus but also to create a new Russian narrative that speaks to Putin’s global and national aims. A new state-approved history textbook is to be issued soon, which will be mandatory across all schools and it is expected to present a nationalist perspective which regards the Soviet era as a misguided but effective era in which Russia became a world power. Putting Dzerzhinsky back on his pedestal is just a particularly physical expression of Putin’s desire to reclaim the Soviet past.
