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Editorial Notebook; The Red Deeds of Iron Feliks
By KARL E. MEYER
Published: August 27, 1991
http://www.nytimes.com/1991/08/27/op...on-feliks.html
http://christian-identity.net/forum/...=4216#post4216
http://whitenationalist.org/forum/sh...=4216#post4216
An anti-Soviet joke long current in Warsaw: Q. Who is the greatest Pole in history? A. Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the Polish-born founder of the Cheka, forerunner of the K.G.B. Q. Why? A. Because no Pole killed more Russians.
This begins to suggest the scarlet aura that surrounds Iron Feliks, whose statue was hauled from its pedestal facing K.G.B. headquarters by euphoric Muscovites last week. His Polish epitaph was well earned: his agents were responsible for an estimated 250,000 executions during Russia's civil war, from 1917 to 1922.
Yet Dzerzhinsky reputedly did not relish this butchery. Like Robespierre ("The Incorruptible"), he saw himself as an avenging angel, whose cruel task it was to kill in order to cure. His successors at the K.G.B. liked to repeat his sublimely inapt motto: "I would like to embrace all mankind with my love, to warm it and to cleanse it of the dirt of modern life."
In this cleansing process, Dzerzhinsky created the monster that later devoured millions in Stalin's purges. What was meant to be a temporary expedient to "save" the Russian Revolution became its most malignant permanent feature. And it will take far more than toppling a statue to get rid of the secret power wielded by the K.G.B.'s numberless swarm of informers and moles.
Dzerzhinsky's life is freshly retold in a new history of the K.G.B. by Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, a defecting agent. Like other Old Bolsheviks, Dzerzhinsky was of bourgeois origin, born of a Polish landowning family in Lithuania, then part of Russia. His boyhood goal was to become a Catholic priest, but he turned his fanatic ardor instead to Marxism.
Iron Feliks spent 11 years in jail or exile before becoming Lenin's trusted lieutenant. On Dec. 20, 1917 -- still the day of the month when K.G.B. paychecks are issued -- the Cheka was established as "the shield and the sword" of the embattled revolution. Capital punishment was reinstated, and Lenin urgently called for a "special system of organized violence" to impose a proletarian dictatorship.
By 1920, step by step, Chekists became a law unto themselves, liquidating not only suspected counterrevolutionaries but rich peasants and nonconforming intellectuals. "We are not waging war against individuals," a Cheka chief exhorted. "We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. . . . In this lies the significance and essence of the Red Terror."
Dzerzhinsky never doubted that universal happiness would redeem a blood sacrifice. His agents, he insisted, required "a warm heart, a cool head and clean hands." And he was pitiless. When Chekists arrested the writer Nikolai Gumilev, an agent wondered if it was permissible to kill one of Russia's leading poets. "Are we entitled to make an exception for a poet and still shoot the others?" responded Iron Feliks.
After his death in 1927, Dzerzhinsky's name was venerated, his death mask and uniform placed in a glass coffin in the K.G.B. officers' club. It was Iron Feliks, after all, who began the successful penetration of Western spy services that culminated in the recruitment of Kim Philby. Fondly, half-seriously, he was called "Saint Feliks" by his privileged brood on the Moscow square that still bears his name.
It will take a hefty silver stake to inter the legacy of this ascetic Pole who killed with a clean conscience for a revolution Russians now wish to unmake.
By KARL E. MEYER
Published: August 27, 1991
http://www.nytimes.com/1991/08/27/op...on-feliks.html
http://christian-identity.net/forum/...=4216#post4216
http://whitenationalist.org/forum/sh...=4216#post4216
An anti-Soviet joke long current in Warsaw: Q. Who is the greatest Pole in history? A. Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the Polish-born founder of the Cheka, forerunner of the K.G.B. Q. Why? A. Because no Pole killed more Russians.
This begins to suggest the scarlet aura that surrounds Iron Feliks, whose statue was hauled from its pedestal facing K.G.B. headquarters by euphoric Muscovites last week. His Polish epitaph was well earned: his agents were responsible for an estimated 250,000 executions during Russia's civil war, from 1917 to 1922.
Yet Dzerzhinsky reputedly did not relish this butchery. Like Robespierre ("The Incorruptible"), he saw himself as an avenging angel, whose cruel task it was to kill in order to cure. His successors at the K.G.B. liked to repeat his sublimely inapt motto: "I would like to embrace all mankind with my love, to warm it and to cleanse it of the dirt of modern life."
In this cleansing process, Dzerzhinsky created the monster that later devoured millions in Stalin's purges. What was meant to be a temporary expedient to "save" the Russian Revolution became its most malignant permanent feature. And it will take far more than toppling a statue to get rid of the secret power wielded by the K.G.B.'s numberless swarm of informers and moles.
Dzerzhinsky's life is freshly retold in a new history of the K.G.B. by Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, a defecting agent. Like other Old Bolsheviks, Dzerzhinsky was of bourgeois origin, born of a Polish landowning family in Lithuania, then part of Russia. His boyhood goal was to become a Catholic priest, but he turned his fanatic ardor instead to Marxism.
Iron Feliks spent 11 years in jail or exile before becoming Lenin's trusted lieutenant. On Dec. 20, 1917 -- still the day of the month when K.G.B. paychecks are issued -- the Cheka was established as "the shield and the sword" of the embattled revolution. Capital punishment was reinstated, and Lenin urgently called for a "special system of organized violence" to impose a proletarian dictatorship.
By 1920, step by step, Chekists became a law unto themselves, liquidating not only suspected counterrevolutionaries but rich peasants and nonconforming intellectuals. "We are not waging war against individuals," a Cheka chief exhorted. "We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. . . . In this lies the significance and essence of the Red Terror."
Dzerzhinsky never doubted that universal happiness would redeem a blood sacrifice. His agents, he insisted, required "a warm heart, a cool head and clean hands." And he was pitiless. When Chekists arrested the writer Nikolai Gumilev, an agent wondered if it was permissible to kill one of Russia's leading poets. "Are we entitled to make an exception for a poet and still shoot the others?" responded Iron Feliks.
After his death in 1927, Dzerzhinsky's name was venerated, his death mask and uniform placed in a glass coffin in the K.G.B. officers' club. It was Iron Feliks, after all, who began the successful penetration of Western spy services that culminated in the recruitment of Kim Philby. Fondly, half-seriously, he was called "Saint Feliks" by his privileged brood on the Moscow square that still bears his name.
It will take a hefty silver stake to inter the legacy of this ascetic Pole who killed with a clean conscience for a revolution Russians now wish to unmake.