Felix Dzerzhinsky

Felix Dzerzhinsky, a Pole from a noble family near Vilna, spent the first years of the war in tsarist prisons and in katorga. He was freed only by the February Revolution. Nine months later he was at the head of the Cheka, the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, which the government of Vladimir Lenin set up to fight counter-revolution and sabotage. In 1918 he turned an office of a few dozen people in Petrograd into a powerful political police with the right to arrest, try and shoot without trial, and in the autumn he directed the Red Terror. In the dispute over the Brest peace he sided with Lenin’s opponents, and in July his own institution became the instrument of an assassination of the German envoy. He was on the side of the Entente only formally: the government he served took Russia out of the war.

Before the war

He was born on 11 September 1877 (30 August by the Julian calendar) on the family estate of Dzierżynowo in the Oszmiana district of the Vilna Governorate, in what is now Belarus. His father, a grammar-school teacher, died when Felix was five. The boy grew up in a deeply Catholic and patriotic atmosphere and is said to have dreamt of the priesthood as a child. At the Vilna gymnasium he encountered Marxism, and in 1895 he joined the Lithuanian Social Democrats. He did not finish school.

From 1897 he was a professional revolutionary. Arrested for the first time in Kovno and exiled to the Vyatka Governorate, he escaped from exile. In 1900 he was among the founders of the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, a party that rejected the slogan of Polish independence and staked everything on a joint revolution with the Russian workers. After another arrest and an escape on the way to exile in Yakutia, he worked as an émigré in Berlin and Kraków, and during the revolution of 1905 in Warsaw. At the congress in Stockholm in 1906 he joined the Central Committee of the Russian Social Democrats on behalf of the SDKPiL. He was held in the Tenth Pavilion of the Warsaw Citadel, where he wrote “A Prisoner’s Diary”. In 1909 he was exiled to Siberia for life, and escaped after a few weeks. In 1910–1912 he directed the party’s work in the Kingdom from Kraków, and married the SDKPiL activist Zofia Muszkat, with whom he had a son, Jan.

The war in prison

In September 1912, after returning to Warsaw under a false name, Dzerzhinsky was arrested for the sixth time. In May 1914 a court sentenced him to three years of katorga. When war broke out, the authorities evacuated the prisoners from Warsaw into the interior of Russia. Dzerzhinsky ended up in the harsh katorga prison in Oryol, where typhus, hunger and lice were rife. According to his biographers he led a prisoners’ hunger strike there that forced an improvement in conditions. In the spring of 1916 he was taken to Moscow, where at a new trial he received another six years of katorga. He was held in Butyrka with fetters on his legs. He thus watched the war from behind bars, and for years he had almost no news of his family, who had remained in Switzerland.

1917: from katorga to the Smolny

On 14 March 1917 (1 March Old Style) crowds and armed workers opened the Moscow prisons. Dzerzhinsky walked out in prison clothes and spoke at a rally the same day. He was exhausted and ill with tuberculosis, so he spent part of the spring and summer convalescing. He threw in his lot with the Bolsheviks, and at their Sixth Congress in August he joined the Central Committee. During the Kornilov putsch he organised armed workers’ detachments in Petrograd, and in the autumn he consistently supported Lenin in the Central Committee against Kamenev and Zinoviev, who opposed the uprising. He joined the party’s military-revolutionary centre and the Military Revolutionary Committee (PL) of the Petrograd Soviet. During the coup he was responsible for seizing the post office and the telegraph, and then for a dozen or so days he was commandant of the Smolny.

Chairman of the Cheka

On 20 December 1917 the Council of People’s Commissars heard his report on the struggle against the “sabotage” of officials and set up the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission. Dzerzhinsky became its chairman. According to the memoirs of Jēkabs Peters, Lenin then called him a “proletarian Jacobin”. The beginnings were modest: a few dozen people, headquarters on Gorokhovaya Street in Petrograd, the cash kept in Peters’s desk drawer. Among the first collaborators were also Poles, such as Józef Unszlicht, who came from Mława.

In the dispute over peace with Germany Dzerzhinsky belonged to the Left Communists, who preferred a “revolutionary war” to capitulation. On 18 February 1918, after the German offensive began, he was among the opponents of accepting the German terms. On 23 February, however, he decided that a split in the party would be worse than a bad peace, and together with Trotsky and others abstained, which gave Lenin his majority. The offensive also brought a turning point in the Cheka’s work. The decree “The Socialist Fatherland Is in Danger” of 21 February ordered enemy agents, speculators and “counter-revolutionary agitators” to be shot on the spot, and Dzerzhinsky’s commission immediately claimed this right for itself. In March it moved to Moscow together with the government and occupied the building of an insurance company on the Lubyanka. On the night of 11–12 April Chekists and soldiers broke up the Moscow anarchist groups by force of arms, the Cheka’s first great operation against former allies of the Bolsheviks on the left.

Mirbach and the Red Terror

The Cheka also included Left Socialist Revolutionaries, the Bolsheviks’ allies in the government, who regarded the Brest peace as treason. On 6 July 1918 two of them, the commission’s employees Yakov Blumkin and Nikolai Andreyev, shot the German envoy Wilhelm von Mirbach in Moscow, having shown at the legation a warrant with a forged signature of Dzerzhinsky, stamped by his deputy, a Left SR. Dzerzhinsky went in person to the headquarters of the mutinous Cheka detachment to demand that the assassins be handed over, and the SRs took him hostage. He was freed the next day, when Latvian riflemen crushed the uprising. In German eyes the affair was compromising, because the assassins were officials of his institution. On 7 July Dzerzhinsky resigned so as not to direct, as a witness, an investigation into his own case. He returned to the post on 22 August.

A few days later, on 30 August, the head of the Petrograd Cheka, Moisei Uritsky, was killed by an SR in Petrograd, and in Moscow Lenin was wounded. Dzerzhinsky went to Petrograd the same day to direct the investigation. The Cheka arrested thousands of people and announced the discovery of a conspiracy of Western diplomats, and in the storming of the British embassy in Petrograd Commander Francis Cromie was killed. On 3 September Izvestia printed an appeal of the Cheka, written by Dzerzhinsky and Peters, calling for the “hydra of counter-revolution” to be trampled down by “mass terror”, and on 5 September the Council of People’s Commissars, after his report, adopted the resolution on the Red Terror. Dzerzhinsky later said that these acts had at last given the Cheka the right to deal with its enemies without asking anyone’s permission. Hostages from the old elites, officers, priests and people suspected of links with the Whites were shot. How many died in the autumn of 1918 is not known. Historians’ estimates range from several thousand to well over ten thousand victims, and for the whole period of the Civil War they are many times higher.

In October, with a false passport and with Lenin’s consent, Dzerzhinsky went to Switzerland for a few weeks, where after years of separation he saw his wife and son. At the beginning of 1919 the Central Committee sent him with Joseph Stalin to the Urals to investigate the causes of the loss of Perm.

After the war

Until his death he headed the political police, renamed the GPU in 1922 and then the OGPU. At the same time he was Commissar for Internal Affairs, Commissar for Communications and, from 1924, chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the National Economy. In the summer of 1920, during the Polish–Soviet War, he joined the Provisional Polish Revolutionary Committee, which waited in Białystok for the capture of Warsaw in order to take power in Poland. He also dealt with the struggle against child homelessness, which Soviet propaganda was keen to highlight. He died of a heart attack in Moscow on 20 July 1926, a few hours after a vehement speech at a plenum of the Central Committee. He was buried by the Kremlin Wall.

Assessment

In the Soviet Union Dzerzhinsky became the patron of the secret services and an object of cult. “Iron Felix”, the knight of the revolution with “a warm heart, a cool head and clean hands”, looked down from his pedestal in front of the Lubyanka until August 1991, when a crowd brought about the removal of the monument. His Warsaw monument was dismantled in 1989. Officers of the Soviet and Russian political police still call themselves Chekists.

Historians such as George Leggett, in his monograph on the Cheka, or Richard Pipes see him as the creator of an institution that abolished the boundary between investigation, trial and execution and became the model for the system of terror in the USSR. They stress his personal asceticism, his honesty in money matters and his fanatical devotion to the cause, which allowed him to send people to their deaths without hesitation. In Poland he is also remembered as a man who all his life opposed the independence of his own country, and in 1920 was ready to take power in it from the hands of the Red Army. In the history of the First World War he is above all a symbol of how Russia’s defeat and disintegration opened the way to a dictatorship whose instrument he made the Cheka.