Felix Dzerjinski

Feliks Dzierżyński or Felix Edmundovitch Dzerjinski (ФеликсЭдмундовичДзержинский), called Felix de Fer , (September 11th 1877 close to Vilnius, Poland - July 20th 1926) was a communist Révolution naire of Polish origin, which became one of the leaders of the Soviet Union. It founded and directed the Tchéka, the political police of the very new State Bolshevik and which will become later the KGB.

A regularly imprisoned “agitator”

Dzerjinski is resulting from a family of the Polish aristocracy installed close to Minsk in Bielorussia, which formed part of the Russian Empire then. It was excluded from the school for “revolutionary activity”. To Vilno, it adhered in 1895 to a Marxist grouping, the SDKPiL, left social democrat the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania founded recently.

It passes most of its life in prison. Stopped for its subversive activities in 1897 and 1900, it was exiled in Siberia, and escaped from it twice. Emigrated in 1902, it becomes one of assistant of Rosa Luxembourg and Leo Jogiches both placed at the head of SDKPiL. It turns over to Russia to take share with the Révolution of 1905 but is again arrested by the Okhrana and is imprisoned.

With the Congress of Stockholm of POSDR in 1906, he is elected at the central committee. Its sympathies to the Bolcheviks go back to this time. After 1911, when the scission within the Polish Party envenime the relationship between Rosa Luxembourg and Lénine, it is divided between its fidelity with the Party and its friendship for the leading one. Slackened in 1912, it takes again its political activities at once to be again imprisoned with Moscow. The day before the Revolution of February 1917, Dzerjinski spent eleven years in prison, exile or with the bagne.

One of the leaders of the Revolution of October

It is released (or perhaps does he escape?) in March 1917. At once, it joined the rows of the Bolchevique S. With Stalin, Sverdlov, Boubnov and Ouritsky, it is one of the five members of the revolutionary Military committee charged to direct the Insurrection (crowned success) and one of the firmest supports of Lénine during these events.

Its character considered as honest and incorruptible by some, joined to an adhesion without limits with the ideology Bolshevik, is worth a rapid recognition to him and the nickname of “iron Felix”. Victor Serge describes it as follows: “idealistic honest, relentless and chivalrous, with the profile émacié of inquisitor, great face, osseous nose, rough goatee, a mine of tiredness and hardness. But the party had few men of this hardening and much of Tchékas”. These responsibilities will give him also later in the European press the brutal face of the Bolshevik assoiffé of blood.

The installation of the secret police

Lénine regarded Dzerjinski as a hero of the Russian Révolution and had a presentiment of it to organize the combat against the “enemies of the interior”. December 20th 1917, the Soviet of the Police chiefs of the People founds the Vétchéka, Russian initials for extraordinary Commission panrusse to fight the counter-revolution and sabotage (more known under the name of Tchéka). This one is equipped with important and priority means. The new organization is made known very quickly by its radical and terrorist methods, its tireless fight against “the forces counter-revolutionaries”. When the civil war affects all the country, Dzerjinski organizes troops of internal security in order to reinforce the authority of its militia. Lénine grants to him any capacity in its combat against all the oppositions (which they are of gasoline Démocratique, Socialiste, Libérale, agrarian or Nationaliste). This war takes, in particular, the forms of the suppression and the prohibition of the trade unions, of the prohibition of freedom of the press (closing by the force of all the press agencies not Bolsheviks with knowing 95 % of the Russian press of 1917), of the dissolution of all the political parties, the creation of a repressive apparatus which will reach its apogee in the Thirties.

During the civil war, which makes at least 6 million deaths, even 12 million victims according to the last evaluations of Russian historians (but which also include in this figure the victims of the famines), this determined man is sent in the difficult places where it is characterized by the organization from massacres not saving neither the women, neither children, nor old men, and aiming to the eradication of the class “middle-class man”, i.e. in fact of the cultivated part, liberal and educated of the Russian company in order to make place for the emergence of a “new man”, the communist man. The extent of the activities of Dzerjinski is to be put in connection with the minority situation of the Bolchevism in the Russian company of 1917, as the results of the election of the first constituent one show it. Beyond, and with the emergence of an effective propaganda which collects the monopoly of the public speech, the Bolsheviks ensure the perenniality of the minority government.

Dzerjinski also takes part in the debates inside the direction of the party. Hostile to Brest-Litovsk, he is opposed with violence to Lénine. Near to Leon Trotski, it approaches Stalin starting from 1921 at the time of “the Business géorgienne” where Lénine regards them both as persons in charge of the brutality of the policy of Russianization. It supports Stalin in the fight against the opposition when this one becomes General secretary in 1922, persuaded that the democracy cannot exist inside the Party without risk for its survival.

The Bolchevique S set up and develop a system of the camp of work, even of extermination (cf camps of the islands Solovki), without any report/ratio in width and of many victims with the bagnes of the monarchical Empire (in 1914 the Russian bagnes count less prisoners, of number and in proportion, that those of the Third French Republic and the United Kingdom, and their detention conditions are famous less hard there). In 1930, is 13 years after the takeover by force Bolshevik, whereas a bureaucratic caste monopolizes the capacity, Stalin creates a separated administration, the Gulag, to manage it. Gulag is used for repression of the former leaders of the Révolution of October and the Communist militants, off-set per thousands, shown not to be in conformity with the line of the sole party. But it is especially like generalized tool for repression that it marks the Russian history of the Twenties at the Thirties. Tchéka and the organizations which succeed to him continue to send in these camps of many “enemies of the people”, whose definition was sufficiently vague to concern any person with the potentially dangerous opinion for the mode and much of them die there.

A growing influence, a sudden disappearance

After the end of the civil war in 1922, Tchéka became the Guépéou, a section of NKVD, but this did not reduce therefore the capacities of Dzerjinski: of 1921 with 1924 he was moreover Minister of Interior Department, Ministre for the Communications and with the head of the Supreme Soviet of the Nation's economy and for this reason will be one of the craftsmen of the New Political Economy (NEP) decided by Lénine to give to a bloodless economy a provisional respite before the launching of the following stages of the total collectivization of the country.

The strengthening of the mode and the conflicts of being able which will emerge in the rows of the communist apparatus to died of Lénine on January 21st, 1924 do not save the chief of the Tchéka which tries to preserve a difficult neutrality between the various fractions. He dies of an heart attack in July 1926 after having taken part in a meeting very agitated with the Central committee in which he had violently carried himself against Kamenev and Piatakov. Certain sources would indicate that it would have been poisoned by Stalin following the discovery of a file concerning the past of double agent of Stalin within the Okhrana but it is more probable than overwork, the violence of the existing relations between the leaders, the daily risks run by the chief of Guépéou cumulated to carry out it, at 49 years, this natural death.

Sign controversies which mark the posterity of Dzerjinski in the old USSR, the Russia news which immediately rehabilitated all the “old Bolsheviks” liquidated by Stalin in the Années 1930, made remove as of August 1991 the statue representing the chief of Tchéka places Loubianka close to the seat of NKVD (the successor of NKVD was MVD then the KGB). Recently, the mayor of Moscow, Iouri Loujkov, proposed to reinstall it, indicating, not without polemics, that for him the name of Felix Dzerjinski “is before any associate with his fight against vagrancy, the re-establishment of the railways and the economic growth”.

Random links: