Felix Dzerzhinsky
Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, nicknamed Iron Felix, was a Soviet revolutionary and politician of Polish origin. From 1917 until his death in 1926, he led the first three Soviet secret police organizations, the Cheka, the GPU and the OGPU, establishing state security organs for the Bolshevik government. He was a key architect of the Red Terror and de-Cossackization.
Born to a Polish family of noble descent in their Ozhyemblovo Estate, in Russian Poland, Dzerzhinsky embraced revolutionary politics from a young age, and was active in the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania party. Active in Kaunas and Warsaw, he was frequently arrested and underwent several exiles to Siberia, from which he escaped every time. He evaded the tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, whose work he took interest in. Dzerzhinsky participated in the failed 1905 Revolution, and after a final arrest in 1912, was imprisoned until the February Revolution of 1917. He then joined Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik party, and played an active role in the October Revolution which brought them to power.
In December 1917, Lenin named Dzerzhinsky head of the newly established All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, tasking him with the suppression of counter-revolutionary activities in Soviet Russia. The Russian Civil War saw a vast expansion of the Cheka's authority, inaugurating a campaign of mass arrests, detentions, and executions known as the Red Terror. An estimated 50,000 to 200,000 people were executed by the Cheka during the years of the civil war. The agency was reorganized as the State Political Directorate in 1922, and then as the Joint State Political Directorate a year later, with Dzerzhinsky remaining as head of the powerful organization. He served as director of the Supreme Soviet of the National Economy from 1924.
Dzerzhinsky died of a heart attack in 1926, and was buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. He was remembered by secret police agents as a hero of the revolution. A large statue of him stood in front of the security service headquarters at Moscow's Lubyanka Building until 1991. He also became a prominent symbol of repression and brutality to critics of the Soviet Union.
Early life
Felix Dzerzhinsky was born on 11 September 1877 to ethnically Polish parents of noble descent at the Ozhyemblovo family estate, about, from the small town of Ivyanets in the Minsk Governorate of Russian Poland In the Russian Empire, his family was of a type known as "column-listed nobility" , whose nobility was formally acknowledged, but so old that they did not enjoy the privileges of the new nobility. His sister Wanda died at the age of 12, when she was accidentally shot with a hunting rifle on the family estate by one of her brothers. At the time of the incident, there were conflicting claims as to whether Felix or his brother Stanisław was responsible for the accident.His father, Edmund-Rufin Dzierżyński graduated from the Saint Petersburg Imperial University in 1863 and moved to Vilnius, where he worked as a home teacher for a professor of Saint Petersburg University named Januszewski and eventually married Januszewski's daughter Helena Ignatievna, who also was of Polish origin. In 1868, after a short period in Kherson gymnasium, he worked as a gymnasium teacher of physics and mathematics at the schools of Taganrog in the Don Host Province, Russia, particularly the Chekhov Gymnasium. In 1875, Edmund Dzierżyński retired due to health conditions and moved with his family to his estate near Ivyanets and Rakaŭ. In 1882, Felix's father died from tuberculosis.
As a youngster Dzerzhinsky became a polyglot, speaking Polish, Russian, German and Latin. He attended the Vilnius Gymnasium from 1887 to 1895. One of the older students at this gymnasium was his future arch-enemy, Józef Piłsudski. Years later, as Marshal of Poland, Piłsudski recalled that Dzerzhinsky "distinguished himself as a student with delicacy and modesty. He was rather tall, thin and demure, making the impression of an ascetic with the face of an icon... Tormented or not, this is an issue history will clarify; in any case this person did not know how to lie." School documents show that Dzerzhinsky attended his first year in school twice, while he was not able to finish his eighth year. Dzerzhinsky received a school diploma which stated: "Dzerzhinsky Feliks, who is 18 years of age, of Catholic faith, along with a satisfactory attention and satisfactory diligence showed the following successes in sciences, namely: Divine law—"good"; Logic, Latin, Algebra, Geometry, Mathematical geography, Physics, History, French—"satisfactory"; Russian and Greek—"unsatisfactory".
Political affiliations and arrests
Two months before he expected to graduate, the gymnasium expelled Dzerzhinsky for "revolutionary activity" and for posting signs with socialist slogans at the school. He had joined a Marxist group, the Union of Workers, in 1895. In late April 1896, he was one of 15 delegates at the first congress of the Lithuanian Social Democratic Party. In 1897, he attended the second congress of the LSDP, where it rejected independence in favor of national autonomy. On 18 March 1897, he was sent to Kaunas to take advantage of the arrest of the Polish Socialist Party branch. He worked in a book-binding factory and set up an illegal press. As an organizer of a shoemakers' strike, Dzerzhinsky was arrested for "criminal agitation among the Kaunas workers"; the police files from this time state: "Felix Dzerzhinsky, considering his views, convictions and personal character, will be very dangerous in the future, capable of any crime." Dzerzhinsky envisioned merging the LSDP with the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party and took the same position as influential Social Democrat Rosa Luxemburg on what was referred to in contemporary writings as "The National Question," i.e., the right of nations to self determination.He was arrested on a denunciation for his revolutionary activities for the first time in 1897, after which he served almost a year in the Kaunas prison. In 1898, Dzerzhinsky was exiled for three years to the Vyatka Governorate where he worked at a local tobacco factory. There Dzerzhinsky was arrested for agitating for revolutionary activities and was sent north to the village of. In August 1899, he returned to Vilnius. Dzerzhinsky subsequently became one of the founders of Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania in 1899. In February 1900, he was arrested again and served his time at first in the Alexander Citadel in Warsaw and later at the Siedlce prison. In 1902, Dzerzhinsky was sent deep into Siberia for the next five years to the remote town of Vilyuysk, while en route being temporarily held at the Alexandrovsk Transitional Prison near Irkutsk. While in exile, he escaped on a boat and later emigrated from the country. He traveled to Berlin, where at the SDKPiL conference Dzerzhinsky was elected a secretary of its party committee abroad and met with several prominent leaders of the Polish Social Democratic movement, including Rosa Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches. They gained control of the party organization through the creation of a committee called the Komitet Zagraniczny, which dealt with the party's foreign relations. As secretary of the KZ, Dzerzhinsky was able to dominate the SDKPiL. In Berlin, he organized publication of the newspaper Czerwony Sztandar, and transportation of illegal literature from Kraków into Congress Poland. Being a delegate to the IV Congress of SDKPiL in 1903, Dzerzhinsky was elected as a member of its General Board.
Dzerzhinsky visited Switzerland, where his fiancée Julia Goldman, the sister of Boris Gorev and Mikhail Liber, was undergoing treatment for tuberculosis. She died in his arms on 4 June 1904. Her illness and death depressed him – in letters to his sister, Dzerzhinsky explained that he no longer saw any meaning for his life. That changed with the Russian Revolution of 1905, as Dzerzhinsky became involved with work again. After the revolution failed he was again jailed in July 1905, this time by the Okhrana. In October, he was released on amnesty. As a delegate to the 4th Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in Stockholm, Dzerzhinsky entered the central body of the party. From July through September 1906, he lived in Saint Petersburg and then returned to Warsaw, where he was arrested again in December of the same year. In June 1907, Dzerzhinsky was released on bail. At the 5th Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in London in May–June 1907, he was elected in absentia as a member of the Central Committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party. In April 1908, Dzerzhinsky was arrested once again in Warsaw and again exiled to Siberia in 1909. As before, Dzerzhinsky managed to escape. In 1910, he reached Italy, where he met Maxim Gorky on Capri; he then returned to Poland.
Back in Kraków in 1910, Dzerzhinsky married RSDLP party member Zofia Muszkat, who was already pregnant. A month later she was arrested; she gave birth to their son Janek in Pawiak prison. In 1911, Zofia was sentenced to permanent Siberian exile, and she left the child with her father. Dzerzhinsky saw his son for the first time in March 1912 in Warsaw. In attending the welfare of his child, Dzerzhinsky repeatedly exposed himself to the danger of arrest. On one occasion, Dzerzhinsky narrowly escaped an ambush that the police had prepared at the apartment of his father-in-law.
File:Дзержинские в Швейцарии.jpg|thumb|Dzerzhinsky pictured with wife Sofia and son Janek in Lugano, October 1918
Dzerzhinsky continued to direct the Social Democratic Party, while considering his continued freedom "only a game of the Okhrana". The Okhrana, however, was not playing a game; Dzerzhinsky simply was a master of conspiratorial techniques and was therefore extremely difficult to find. A police file from this time says: "Dzerzhinsky continued to lead the Social Democratic party and at the same time he directed party work in Warsaw, led strikes, published appeals to workers, and traveled on party matters to Łódź and Kraków." The police were unable to arrest Dzerzhinsky until the end of 1912, when they found the apartment where he lived in the name of Władysław Ptasiński.