Felix
Dzerzhinsky,
the son of a Polish landowner, was born in Vilno in 1877. He joined
the Lithuanian Social Democratic Party and helped to organize factory
workers into trade unions.
Dzerzhinsky
was arrested in 1897 but managed to escape from Siberia
two years later. He went to Warsaw where he joined the Social Democratic
Party of Poland that had been formed by Rosa
Luxemburg and Leo
Jogiches in 1893.
Dzerzhinsky
was arrested again and spent another nine years in Siberia until being
released as a result of the political amnesty that followed the February
Revolution and played an active role in the October
Revolution.
In December,
1917, Vladimir Lenin appointed Dzerzhinsky
as Commissar for Internal Affairs and head of the All-Russian Extraordinary
Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage (Cheka).
In September, 1918, Dzerzhinsky instigated the Red
Terror that followed the attempt by Dora
Kaplan on the life of Lenin. He was also responsible for dealing
with the sailors arrested during the Kronstadt
Uprising. According to Victor Serge
over 500 sailors were executed for their part in the rebellion.
Dzerzhinsky
was appointed as People's Commissar for Transport in 1921. However,
he remained in control of Cheka and in
1922 he transformed it into the State Political Administration (GPU).
In January
1924 he was appointed chairman of the Supreme Council of National
Economy. With the support of Joseph Stalin,
he was elevated to the Politburo. Felix
Dzerzhinsky
died of a heart attack on 20th July 1926.
(1)
The
Granat Encyclopaedia of the Russian Revolution was published by
the Soviet government in 1924. The encyclopaedia included a collection
of autobiographies and biographies of over two hundred people involved
in the Russian Revolution. Felix Dzerzhinsky was one
of those invited to write his autobiography.
The February
Revolution freed me from the central Moscow prison. Until August 1917,
I looked in Moscow, and then in that month I was one of the Moscow
delegates to the RSDRP. In the October Revolution, I was a member
of the Military Revolutionary Committee, and then I was entrusted
with the task of organizing the Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle
against Sabotage and Counterrevolution I was appointed its Chairman,
holding at the same time the post of Commissar for Internal Affairs.
(2)
Victor Serge,
Memoirs of a Revolutionary (1945)
Since the
first massacres of Red prisoners by the Whites, the murders of Volodarsky
and Uritsky and the attempt against Lenin (in the summer of 1918),
the custom of arresting and, often, executing hostages had become
generalized and legal. Already Cheka, which made mass arrests of suspects,
the was tending to settle their fate independently, under formal control
of the Party, but in reality without anybody's knowledge.
The Party
endeavoured to head it with incorruptible men like the former convict
Dzerzhinsky, a sincere idealist, ruthless but chivalrous, with the
emaciated profile of an Inquisitor: tall forehead, bony nose, untidy
goatee, and an expression of weariness and austerity. But the Party
had few men of this stamp and many Chekas.
I believe
that the formation of the Chekas was one of the gravest and most impermissible
errors that the Bolshevik leaders committed in 1918 when plots, blockades,
and interventions made them lose their heads. All evidence indicates
that revolutionary tribunals, functioning in the light of day and
admitting the right of defence, would have attained the same efficiency
with far less abuse and depravity. Was it necessary to revert to the
procedures of the Inquisition?
By the
beginning of 1919, the Chekas had little or no resistance against
this psychological perversion and corruption. I know for a fact that
Dzerzhinsky judged them to be "half-rotten", and saw no
solution to the evil except in shooting the worst Chekists and abolishing
the death-penalty as quickly as possible.
(3)
Bolshevik
newspaper, Krasnaya Gazeta, announcing the start of the Red
Terror on 1st September, 1918.
We will
turn our hearts into steel, which we will temper in the fire of suffering
and the blood of fighters for freedom. We will make our hearts cruel,
hard, and immovable, so that no mercy will enter them, and so that
they will not quiver at the sight of a sea of enemy blood. We will
let loose the floodgates of that sea. Without mercy, without sparing,
we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds. Let them be thousands;
let them drown themselves in their own blood. For the blood of Lenin
and Uritsky, Zinovief and Volodarski, let there be floods of the blood
of the bourgeois - more blood, as much as possible.
(4)
Felix Dzerzhinsky, interviewed in Novaia Zhizn (14th July,
1918)
We stand
for organized terror - this should be frankly admitted. Terror is
an absolute necessity during times of revolution. Our aim is to fight
against the enemies of the Soviet Government and of the new order
of life. We judge quickly. In most cases only a day passes between
the apprehension of the criminal and his sentence. When confronted
with evidence criminals in almost every case confess; and what argument
can have greater weight than a criminal's own confession.
(5)
Victor Serge, along with Emma
Goldman and Alexander Berkman,
had attempted to mediate between the Kronstadt sailors and the Soviet
government. His account of the uprising appeared in his book Memoirs
of a Revolutionary.
The final
assault was unleashed by Tukhacevsky on 17 March, and culminated in
a daring victory over the impediment of the ice. Lacking any qualified
officers, the Kronstadt sailors did not know how to employ their artillery;
there was, it is true, a former officer named Kozlovsky among them,
but he did little and exercised no authority. Some of the rebels managed
to reach Finland. Others put up a furious resistance, fort to fort
and street to street; they stood and were shot crying, "Long
live the world revolution! Hundreds of prisoners were taken away to
Petrograd and handed to the Cheka; months later they were still being
shot in small batches, a senseless and criminal agony. Those defeated
sailors belonged body and soul to the Revolution; they had voiced
the suffering and the will of the Russian people. This protracted
massacre was either supervised or permitted by Dzerzhinsky.
Available
from Amazon Books (order below)
