The Return of Iron Felix

Imagine the following scenario: The mayor of Berlin proposes that an exiled statue of Hermann Goering be restored to a prominent city square. He argues that while certain people may remember the Nazi leader as a vicious war criminal who founded the Gestapo, others associate him with his patronage of the Hermann Goering Master School for Painting and the Prussian Academy of Arts.

Sound crazy? Of course it does. Yet two months ago a European public official made a request that was virtually identical in its absurdity and moral bankruptcy. On September 13, Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov called for restoring the statue of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, which is currently lying in a park next to other Communist-era sculptures, to its former place in the city’s Lubyanka Square. This immediately set off a wave of protests from outraged citizens, the Russian Orthodox Church, various human rights organizations and members of Russia’s parliament. Dzerzhinsky, you see, was to Soviet mass violence what Goering and Heinrich Himmler were to the Nazi Holocaust. After the “October Revolution” of 1917, he founded the Cheka—the Bolshevik secret police force that produced, in the words of Russian historian Orlando Figes, a “machinery of terror” during the nation’s civil war (1917-1921). Figes has estimated that the Cheka killed “certainly several hundred thousand, if one includes all those in its camps and prisons as well as those who were executed or killed by [its] troops in the suppression of strikes and revolts.”

Since Dzerzhinsky was, along with Vladimir Lenin, the driving impetus behind this savagery, he was given the nickname “Iron Felix.” At his orders, captured “enemies” of the regime were often sent to forced labor and concentration camps or else just summarily killed in their jail cells. On one night alone in 1919, some 1,500 Moscow prisoners were executed at Dzerzhinsky’s command. His Cheka was also feared for its particularly sadistic methods of torture. These included shoving victims into tanks of boiling water, sawing their bones in half and allowing rats to eat through their internal organs. The Cheka later evolved into the infamous KGB, a similarly murderous, clandestine security organ that would paralyze the Soviet people with fear for decades.

Despite the reality of Dzerzhinsky’s butchery and his odious place in Russian history, Luzhkov claims that restoring his statue would actually send a positive message. “Some people associate [Dzerzhinsky’s] name with the KGB, but others link it with efforts to combat the problems of homeless children and poverty,” he has asserted. By Luzhkov’s rationale, and extending the earlier analogy, one might contend that Goering’s benefaction to young painters is a more important part of his legacy than his establishment of the Gestapo, operation of death camps and complicity in the slaughter of millions of Jews. This would be absolute nonsense—just as it is nonsense to argue that Dzerzhinsky’s supposed role in combating homelessness and destitution, however substantial that may or may not have been, is more historically relevant than his creation of a secret police force that tortured, maimed and killed on a genocidal scale.

According to a poll conducted in early October by the All-Russian Public Opinion Center, some 41 percent of Moscow’s residents support Luzhkov’s plan, while 50 percent are against it. Many have complained that on two previous occasions during his mayoralty, Luzhkov rejected the initiative of bringing back Dzerzhinsky’s statue. Rumors have swirled that he is now endorsing the scheme to curry favor with Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, an ex-KGB colonel.

But the mayor ought to remember that when the 15-ton bronze scuplture was toppled and carried off in August 1991—during a three-day coup that heralded the final demise of the Soviet Union—grateful bystanders whistled, cheered and applauded. As Princeton University professor Kathryn Stoner-Weiss observed last month in a Los Angeles Times op-ed, “The fall of Iron Felix was a bold declaration that KGB repression would have no role in Russia’s democratic future.”

Bringing back the Dzerzhinsky statue would certainly set a terrible precedent. At a time when Muscovites have witnessed firsthand the horrors of terrorism, it would be a great shame if their city resurrects a monument to one of the worst terrorists in Russian history.