In September President Vladimir Putin restored the title “Dzerzhinsky Division” to an elite Moscow police unit. So what, you say? Well, that’s the point. As the novelist Martin Amis put it in Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, “Everybody knows of Himmler and Eichmann. Nobody knows of Yezhov and Dzerzhinsky.”
Born in 1877, Felix Dzerzhinsky was a revolutionary who spent 11 years in czarist prisons, three of them in a hard labor camp. A Bolshevik and a murderous fanatic, Dzerzhinsky founded the Cheka, the Soviet secret police. He had a “long burning zealot’s face,” dressed in high hunting boots and simple tunic, and lived a spartan life at his headquarters in the Lubyanka, waging what he called his “fight to the finish.” He kept a little black notebook to enter the names of “enemies” he came across as he did his job. “In 1918–1919, ten thousand persons were shot on the basis of decisions that Dzerzhinsky signed personally,” says David Satter in his It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway, a superb account of the dire consequences for post-Soviet Russia of the failure to face up to its Communist past.
Read full article here: The Rehabilitation of Felix Dzerzhinsky | World Affairs Journal
Also see the following video on this matter…
Putin Revives Bolshevik Legend: Kremlin leader renames police force after KGB founder Dzerzhinsky
