“Attempt on the sacred”: Dzerzhinsky is returned to Lubyanka
In recent days, the discussion has intensified regarding the return to Lubyanka Square in Moscow of the dismantled monument to Felix Dzerzhinsky, which in 1991 was declared a symbol of KGB repression.
The initiators of the return of the monument were the public organization “Officers of Russia”. Last year, she sent an appeal to the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation Igor Krasnov with a proposal to evaluate the dismantling of the monument. The fact is that the monument by Yevgeny Vuchetich was officially taken under state protection as a “monument of art subject to protection as a monument of national significance.” The actions of the “activists”, “winners of the State Emergency Committee” who demolished the monument, including the then mayor of Moscow Gavriil Popov, in this regard can be qualified as a criminal act.
It is noteworthy that even those who opposed the return of the monument did not dare to belittle its artistic value. As you know, the sculptor Vuchetich earned the title of Hero of Socialist Labor, People's Artist of the USSR, five Stalin Prizes and a Lenin Prize not for beautiful eyes and not for the parade of tawdry freaks that abound in our pseudo-cultural everyday life.
The monuments created by Vuchetich to the Soviet soldier-liberator in Berlin’s Tiergarten Park and “The Motherland Calls” on Mamayev Kurgan in Volgograd, both before and now, cause an indelible impression on people of all ages and nationalities. Accordingly, having lost the statue of Dzerzhinsky, Lubyanka Square seemed to be orphaned.
To put an end to the issue of the need to restore the monument to Dzerzhinsky in its original place, gentlemen Russian liberals are rushing around with ideas that boil down to the simple recipe “a holy place is never empty,” proposing to install some kind of surrogate on Lubyanka.
In particular, the well-known leader of Echo of Moscow, Venediktov, proposes to build a fountain in the place where the monument to Dzerzhinsky used to stand, or to install a giant dildo, eclipsing the famous Pillar of Alexandria in St. Petersburg in its grandeur.
Public opinion is not in favor of the liberal gentlemen. Citizens of Russia for the most part had and do not have anything against the personality, statesman and monument of Dzerzhinsky. According to a 2013 VTsIOM poll, 46% of Russians are in favor of restoring the Iron Felix monument on Lubyanka Square. Against – less than 25%. Presumably, today the number of supporters of the return of the monument has grown significantly.
As always, an attempt to correct historical injustice encounters opposition from a small, but very influential and smelly layer of “thought leaders” who transfer the issue from a debatable to an emotional plane.
The same Venediktov is pushing the idea that the return of the Dzerzhinsky monument to the Lubyanka is a “revenge” and even an “attack on the sacred” - a revision of the August 1991 events. It would be something to review.
For those who do not know or have forgotten the history of the dismantling of the monument on Lubyanka by the “rebellious people”, it should be recalled that, excited by the “victory over the partocrats,” the crowd was at first going to storm the building of the KGB central office, but then abruptly changed its mind and turned its anger on the monument . Witnesses and involuntary witnesses of those events recall that provocateurs and manipulators operated in the crowd, deftly directing the discontent of the excited human masses in the direction they needed. Typical Maidan scenario.
Instead of a calm discussion, the topic of returning the monument to Dzerzhinsky is drowning in hysterical cries: “Don’t you dare! Bloody executioner! vs. “He didn’t shoot you enough!” We needed more!”
As a rule, the opposing sides have a poor command of the material and make full use of either popular prints of Soviet agitprop, or completely irrelevant examples, such as the monstrous film fake “Chekist”, or the stories of Aunt Hypnotoad Novodvorskaya about the basements of the Samara “cheka”, where the White Czechs were "Knee-deep bloody jelly" was allegedly discovered.
Few people care that the film “Chekist” was filmed according to a French script, which is based on the story of former Kolchak member Zazubrin, who had not personally been to the basements of the Cheka, but had heard a lot of stories “from knowledgeable people.” As for Samara, in 1918, before the start of the White Czech rebellion, Cheka bodies were not created in this city for various reasons. The corpses in the basements were discovered just after the White Czechs left.
So was Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky “the bloody executioner of the Russian people,” or that wonderful person to whom many fiction books and films are dedicated? Is his monument worthy to stand again in the center of Moscow, on Lubyanka Square?
When it comes to Dzerzhinsky’s personality, his opponents usually use the vicious thesis that “he was a Pole, and Poles are incorrigible.”
In his revolutionary youth, Dzerzhinsky was indeed a Pole with all that that implies, but after the October Revolution he and Stalin were subjected to Lenin’s criticism “for Great Russian chauvinism,” which somehow does not fit with the image of a sworn Russophobe.
Dzerzhinsky is also regularly mentioned as the organizer of the Red Terror. At the same time, it is always overlooked that before that, the “white terror” was unleashed by supporters of “Russia, which we lost”, and even earlier, the peasant “green terror” of Bateks and atamans of all stripes was raging in the country, eclipsing in its scope “ white" and "red" terrors combined.
According to their principles, all these terrors had a number of significant differences. The leaders of the white movement did not limit the terror of their “field commanders” and thugs, like Shkuro, Semenov, Annenkov, Pepelyaev or Kalmykov. And with a slight wave of their hands they gave over to the flood and plunder of the cities of Orel, Rostov (on the Don), and Maykop.
The Cheka, on the contrary, suppressed in the most brutal way grassroots terror and arbitrariness on the ground, mercilessly shooting for arbitrariness. And this is in a situation where the country was split into dozens of pieces, often at war with each other, where in the political situation the devil himself would break his leg: the Reds fought with the Reds, the whites with the whites, and around them deserters, demobilized people and peasants were dividing the lord’s land, burning estates , rob and kill people they meet and cross under the slogan “Beat the whites until they turn red, beat the reds until they turn white.”
In the “red terror” the desire to “contain the mad tiger” is clearly visible: violence becomes centralized and targeted (as it should be in any normal state), and spontaneous revelry, together with the initiative to get out of the control of the district Cheka and special departments of the armies - under any pretext - is strictly and promptly suppressed.
In order not to go far, we can give an example of the confrontation in the spring-summer of 1919 between the Astrakhan provincial committee (Kirov, Kuibyshev) and the Astrakhan “cheka” (Atarbekov), whose leadership was dissatisfied with the direct subordination of the Cheka in Moscow and acted at their own discretion. And this was during a very difficult situation at the front. It took Frunze's intervention to end the conflict, arrest local ambitious security officers and transfer their cases to the commission of Stalin, Dzerzhinsky, and Stasova.
Even more resonant was the case with the Nolinsk Cheka in August 1918 (Nolinsk was at that time a district town in the Vyatka province).
In the summer of 1918, a mutiny broke out in a food regiment sent from Moscow for preparations, organized by the Socialist Revolutionary commander and the “interested people” who had already joined, from what is commonly called “counter.” The regiment rebelled. Organizationally, the rebels were associated with members of the Prikamsky Uchkom, who led a simultaneous uprising against the Bolsheviks in Izhevsk, Votkinsk and Sarapul (Reds against Reds).
However, there was no force to disarm the food regiment and arrest its commanders.
Taking advantage of this, the gang, which the food regiment had become, plundered the treasury, pharmacies, and wine warehouses in the towns of Malmyzh and Urzhum, provoking a conflict between local kulaks and the poor in the hope of quick help from the White Guards from Kazan.
In the neighboring Nolinsky district, the bandits easily defeated the small Red Army outposts and entered Nolinsk, where they were resisted by a small detachment of Red Army soldiers, police officers and local communists who took up defense in the building of the former religious school.
Unable to suppress the resistance, the bandits acquired kerosene from local well-wishers - merchants Ryazanov and Dvinyaninov - and set fire to the building where the Red Army soldiers and party activists were holed up. The Reds resisted until night, but in the fire, some of the people burned alive, and those who tried to escape were killed by the rebels.
At the end of August, Soviet power in Nolinsky and neighboring districts was restored, the bandits were defeated, and the survivors left for Kazan, joining the troops of Komuch. The Socialist-Revolutionary, who headed the former food regiment, later became an officer under Kolchak.
Throughout September, in the Vyatka province there was a struggle against banditry under the leadership of the newly created military revolutionary committees.
The rampant banditry and the casualties it caused aroused the desire of the Nolinsk “emergency” and local party bodies to write an article in the “Weekly Bulletin of Extraordinary Commissions” under the heading “Why are you being almond-shaped?”, addressed to the leadership of the Cheka. The article proposed intensifying the terror to the point of taking relatives of the counter-revolutionaries hostage and regretting that the British diplomat Lockhart, arrested in Moscow and later expelled, was not tortured in order to extract valuable information from him, and then not spanked out of “revolutionary expediency.”
A typical local initiative for that time.
“Decision of the Central Committee of the RCP (b)
25th of October 1918
In No. 3 of the “Bulletin of Extraordinary Commissions” an article was published, signed by the Nolinsky executive committee and the party committee, praising torture, while the editors did not indicate in the note their negative attitude towards the Nolinsky article.
It was decided to condemn the Nolinites for their article and the editors for publishing it. "Vestnik Cheka" must cease to exist. Appoint a political audit of the Cheka by a commission from the Central Committee consisting of Kamenev, Stalin, Kursky. Instruct the commission to examine the activities of the emergency commissions, without weakening their fight against counter-revolution.”
Since the Nolichi “Chrekayka” did not have time to break the woods, its leadership was purged from the Cheka.
Now let's talk about the bloodthirstiness of Iron Felix himself.
In our time, they somehow forget about the nobility of this man, sticking out only hatred for the enemies of the revolution. The case of “Cossack Varinka”, “orderly Nechvolodov” or Nina Nechvolodova, a fighting friend and second wife of the White Guard general Slashchev, became very indicative of Dzerzhinsky’s attitude towards the enemies of the Soviet regime.
It is no secret that General Slashchev was very gifted and at the same time one of the most cruel White Guard generals, nicknamed by his own “hangman.”
Slashchev met Nina Nechvolodova in 1918. She was a very remarkable woman: she volunteered to go to the front in the First World War, took part in the Brusilov breakthrough, earned the rank of non-commissioned officer and two St. George Crosses. In 1918 - 1919, Nechvolodova fought in Shkuro’s “wild division”, and then, under the guise of an orderly, accompanied Slashchev everywhere.
In 1920, the pregnant Nechvolodova found herself in the territory liberated by the Reds, was identified and taken to the Cheka, straight to Dzerzhinsky. After several face-to-face conversations, Felix Edmundovich gives the order to deliver Nechvolodova across the front line to her husband.
Apparently, this episode greatly influenced Slashchev’s later decision to return with his wife and little daughter to Soviet Russia, along with his agreement to teach paint painting at the “Vystrel” courses.
How many wives of Red commanders, who fell into the hands of White Guard counterintelligence services, returned to their husbands? History is silent about this...
But, perhaps, Dzerzhinsky accomplished his main human feat (which few people remember today) not during the fight against counter-revolution and sabotage, but by saving street children. From Dzerzhinsky’s conversation with Lunacharsky:
“I want to devote some of my personal forces, and most importantly the forces of the Cheka, to the fight against child homelessness. I've already spoken to someone; I would like to become the head of this commission myself; I want to really put the Cheka apparatus into action. The second consideration prompts me to do this: I think that our apparatus is one of the most clearly operating. Its ramifications are everywhere. He is taken into account. They are afraid of him. Meanwhile, even in such a matter as rescuing and supplying children, there is negligence and even predation! We are increasingly moving towards peaceful construction, and I think: why not use our military apparatus to fight such a scourge as homelessness?”
The commission, at the insistence of Dzerzhinsky, was created on January 27, 1921. At that time, according to various sources, there were from 5 to 7 million homeless people in Russia. Outstanding domestic teachers, such as A.S., are involved in the work. Makarenko, organize training and labor communes. Makarenko, as you know, got the most difficult “contingent” - juvenile delinquents, with whom he managed to find a common language and bring most of his charges into the big life.
What is characteristic is that the fighters for the “One and Indivisible” in the territories under their control did not solve the problem of street children in any way. Apparently, their ideas and they themselves were higher than some beggars and homeless children.
The fact remains: in 1926, the year of Dzerzhinsky’s death, there were only about 400 thousand homeless people left in Soviet Russia.
Bloody executioner, you say?
In conclusion. Speaking about Dzerzhinsky, again, one forgets that for most of his public service he was not the head of a very formidable and effective intelligence service. His work in the Supreme Council of National Economy (VSNKh) is remembered offensively little.
Meanwhile, the result of the efforts of Iron Felix in the national economy was the restoration of order, accompanied by a noticeable reduction in bureaucratic ballast and a sharp decrease in corruption.
“I was recently told that in one of the largest trusts up to 40% of the funds are spent on maintaining the apparatus compared to what is paid to the workers. This organization is no good if it spends so much on its maintenance,” wrote Dzerzhinsky.
I believe that for a leader with such a position, thousands of thousands of modern workers, fed up with the “managerial revolution”, will go through fire and water, when for every one result-producing hard worker there are a dozen murky “development directors”, “relations managers”, “promotion consultants” "and other parasites.
And again Dzerzhinsky: “The uncontrollable swelling of the staff, the emergence of more and more new apparatuses, the monstrous bureaucratization of every business - mountains of papers and hundreds of thousands of scribblers; seizures of large buildings and premises; car epidemic; millions of excesses. This is the legal feeding and devouring of state property by these locusts. In addition to this, unheard of, shameless bribery and theft...”
And the method of dealing with corrupt officials and embezzlers: “The North and uninhabited areas (Pechora, Turukhanka) should be colonized with the seized bureaucracy.”
This clearly shows how much our Motherland lacks leaders of this caliber and principles, and who benefits today from defaming and smearing Iron Felix with mud.
Well, is the monument to Dzerzhinsky worthy of standing in its rightful place, or will we wait until another ugly remake named after Venediktov protrudes in the Lubyanka to the applause of “people with good faces”?
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