Will Iron Felix scare Moscow’s protesters?

While in the West, the debate seems to be about which statue to topple next, in Russia it’s rather different. Felix Dzerzhinsky – ‘Iron Felix,’ founder of the Bolshevik secret police – looks like he may be coming home, thirty years after his statue was pulled down from its place in front of the KGB’s Lubyanka headquarters.

Dzerzhinsky, a Polish aristocrat turned revolutionary, was charged by Lenin in 1917 to form what was then called the All-Russia Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counter-Revolution and Sabotage – rather more concisely known as the Cheka after the Russian initials for ‘extraordinary commission’ – and lead it into the coming civil war. This would see the Bolsheviks in effect reconquer their country, but at phenomenal human cost.

The Cheka expropriated grain from the countryside to feed the city, at bayonet-point and regardless of the consequent rural famine. Three-man teams called ‘troikas’ acted as revolutionary judges, juries and executioners, summarily executing thousands of ‘enemies of the people.’