Activity politician, nicknamed "Iron Felix" by his contemporaries, causes a mixed reaction. Some call him a hero, some call him an executioner without pity. Many of Dzerzhinsky's statements about politics, economics, and the state apparatus are of interest today.
Childhood and young years
Felix Edmundovich was born in 1877 on the territory of today's Belarus, in the Vilna province. The parents of the future revolutionary come from an intelligent environment: his mother, Polish by nationality, is the daughter of a professor; father, a Jew, a gymnasium teacher. In 1822, Felix's father dies, and his mother is left alone with eight children. Despite the difficult financial situation, they try to give children a good education. A boy who does not know Russian at all is sent to the Imperial Gymnasium. The study did not work out. Dzerzhinsky, who dreams of becoming a priest (Catholic priest), has only one positive assessment in his education document, in the subject “Law of God”.
In 1835, as a student of the gymnasium, the young man became a member of the social democratic movement.
I hated wealth because I fell in love with people, because I see and feel with all the strings of my soul that today people worship the golden calf, which turned human souls into bestial ones and expelled love from people's hearts ...
For spreading revolutionary ideas in 1897, he was arrested. After a year of imprisonment, in 1898, Dzerzhinsky was sent into exile in the Vyatka province. There he continues to agitate among the factory workers. The violent revolutionary is transferred to a remote area, to the village of Kaygorodskoye. Deprived of the opportunity to agitate, Dzerzhinsky escapes to Lithuania, from where he moves to Poland.
revolutionary activity
Dzerzhinsky continues to serve the "cause of the revolution" by joining the Social Democratic Party of Poland and Lithuania (SDPPiL) in 1900. Acquaintance with Lenin's publication Iskra strengthens his convictions. In 1903, after being elected secretary of the SDPPiL foreign committee, Dzerzhinsky arranged the transfer of prohibited literature and the publication of the Krasnoye Znamya newspaper. As a member of the Main Board of the Party (elected in 1903), he organizes sabotage and uprisings of workers in Poland. After the Petrograd events, in 1905, he led the May Day demonstration.
The result of Dzerzhinsky's personal meeting with Lenin in Stockholm in 1906 was Dzerzhinsky's entry into the RSDLP (Russian Social Democratic Party).
In 1909, a revolutionary who continued his party work was arrested, deprived of his class rights and sent to a life-long settlement in Siberia. From the moment he joined the Bolshevik Party and until the February Revolution of 1917, he went to prison eleven times, then to exile or hard labor. Each time he escapes, Dzerzhinsky returns to party activities.
Dzerzhinsky's remarks show his fierce stance as a professional revolutionary:
Let's rest, comrades, in prison.
Remember that in the soul of people like me there is a holy spark... that gives happiness even at the stake.
Dzerzhinsky becomes a member of the Moscow Committee of the Bolshevik Organization after the February Revolution of 1917. Here he is engaged in propaganda of an armed uprising. Lenin assesses the personal qualities of Dzerzhinsky and includes him in the military revolutionary center. F. E. Dzerzhinsky - one of the organizers of the October armed coup.
To live does not mean to have an unshakable faith in victory?
"Chief Chekist"
The Bolsheviks, who gained victory as a result of an armed coup, came to power in 1917. It immediately became necessary to create an organization that would counteract the opponents of the revolution. F. E. Dzerzhinsky was appointed chairman of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage (VChK), established in December 1917. The punitive organization received broad powers, including the right to independently impose death sentences. After moving from Petrograd in 1919, the Chekists occupied the building on the Lubyanka. There is also a prison here, and firing squads work in the basements.
Dzerzhinsky's statements about the Chekists became his slogan in the fight against counter-revolution:
Anyone who becomes cruel and whose heart remains insensitive towards the prisoners must leave here. Here, as in no other place, you need to be kind and noble.
Either saints or scoundrels can serve in the organs.
Only a person with a cold head, a warm heart and clean hands can be a Chekist.
The abbreviation "VChK" is one of the most famous names of the 20th century. The chairman of the department did not tolerate dissent. It is Dzerzhinsky who is considered the initiator of the persecution of the intelligentsia and the clergy.
Philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev wrote about him:
It was a fanatic. In his eyes, he gave the impression of a man possessed. There was something terrible about him ... In the past, he wanted to become a Catholic monk and he transferred his fanatical faith to communism.
An idealist who hated the cruelty of the tsarist secret police, fabricated cases, torture, prisons, hard labor, became an executioner.
I strive with all my heart to ensure that there are no injustices, crimes, drunkenness, debauchery, excesses, excessive luxury, brothels in which people sell their body or soul, or both together; so that there is no oppression, fratricidal wars, national enmity ...
Created by Dzerzhinsky and his associates, the Cheka eventually turned into one of the most effective special services in the world.
Administrative activities
In addition to his activities as chairman of the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky takes an active part in the fight against devastation. Dzerzhinsky's statements are a demonstration of his view on the restoration of a destroyed state.
We must go and explain to every worker and peasant that we [Russia] need funds in order to move our factories, in order to have sufficient raw materials of our own, so that we will not be in such dependence on foreign countries as we can get if we build the development of our economy exclusively through imports from abroad ...
I am not preaching here that we can isolate ourselves from abroad. This is absurd, and this is not necessary at all. But in order not to fall into bondage from foreign capitalists who follow our every step, and when it is wrong, they will immediately try to use it, for this we must work with all our might.
The result of Dzerzhinsky's activities as Commissar of Railways in the 20s was the restoration of more than 10 thousand km railway, more than 200 thousand locomotives and more than 2000 bridges. Having personally traveled to Siberia, in 1919 he was able to ensure the supply of about 40 million tons of grain to the starving regions. By organizing the supply of medicines, he contributed to the fight against typhus.
Creation of orphanages
The activity of the chairman of the Cheka as chairman of the Commission for Combating Homelessness, whose tasks included the organization of labor communes and orphanages, deserves a separate discussion. The buildings confiscated from the "former" have become a haven for a whole generation of homeless children.
The great task before you is to educate and shape the souls of your children. Be vigilant! For the fault or merit of children to a large extent falls on the head and conscience of the parents.
Love for a child, like any great love, becomes creativity and can give a child lasting, true happiness when it enhances the scope of the life of the lover, makes him a full-fledged person, and does not turn the beloved creature into an idol.
Economic activity
In 1922, without leaving the post of chairman of the Cheka, Dzerzhinsky headed the Main Political Directorate of the NKVD and took part in the formation of the new economic policy of the state (NEP). In 1924, Dzerzhinsky became the head of the Higher National Economy of the USSR. He is the initiator of the creation joint-stock companies and enterprises with the attraction of foreign capital. Dzerzhinsky is a supporter of the development of private capital in Soviet Russia and calls for the creation of favorable conditions for this.
Dzerzhinsky's statements about the economy:
The currency is that sensitive thermometer that takes into account what irregularities exist.
If we are now wooden, bastard Russia, then we must become metal Russia.
When we [Russia] build our own factories, start developing our wealth, foreign investors will come to us themselves. But when we kneel before them, they will only despise us and will not give us a penny.
Well, we [Russia] are a peasant state, but our productivity is lower than in Holland, Germany and France. Why? Because, firstly, we do not have nitrogen fertilizers. This means that it is necessary to create a chemical industry for agriculture. Secondly, we plow on a horse, but all over the world this has long been forgotten. We need tractors - where can we get them? We need to build tractor and combine plants, which means we need a powerful metallurgical base, which we have is weak. This means that it is necessary to build metallurgical plants, for the operation of which it is necessary to develop deposits of iron ore, non-ferrous metals, and so on.
Exports should prevail over imports, and the balance for specific types of products and goods should be determined strictly on a planned basis. With us [in Russia], each trust and syndicate is on its own. In almost all questions: on wages, on restoration work, on concentration, on mastering the market. And everyone strove to use all his "happiness" for himself, and to shift his "misfortune" to the state, demanding subsidies, subsidies, loans, high prices.
Fighting bureaucracy
The chairman of the Cheka advocated the fight against bureaucracy and the reform of the country's administrative system.
Dzerzhinsky about Russia:
I came to the irrefutable conclusion that the main work is not in Moscow, but in the localities, that 2/3 of the responsible comrades and specialists from all Party (including the Central Committee), Soviet and trade union institutions must be transferred from Moscow to the localities. And do not be afraid that the central institutions will fall apart. All forces must be directed to the factories, mills and the countryside in order to really raise the productivity of labor, and not the work of pens and offices. Otherwise, we won't get out. The best plans and instructions do not even reach here and hang in the air.
In order for the state [Russia] not to go bankrupt, it is necessary to solve the problem of state apparatuses. Irrepressible swelling of the staff, the monstrous bureaucratization of every business - mountains of papers and hundreds of thousands of hacks; captures of large buildings and premises; car epidemic; millions of excesses. This is legal and the devouring of state property by this locust. In addition to this, unheard of, shameless bribery, theft, negligence, blatant mismanagement, which characterizes our so-called "self-financing", crimes that pump state property into private pockets.
If you look at our entire apparatus of power in Russia, at our entire system of government, if you look at our unheard-of bureaucracy, at our unheard-of fuss with all sorts of approvals, then I am horrified by all this.
To look through the eyes of one's apparatus is the death of a leader.
Iron Felix mercilessly fought the opposition, fearing that a person capable of destroying all the transformations and reforms of the revolution would come to the post of leader of the country.
The ascetically modest Felix Dzerzhinsky is a “knight of the revolution”, an eternal worker who put political and state activity in the first place in his life.
Selected quotes by Dzerzhinsky can serve as a characteristic of the head of the state security department. He died on July 20, 1926 during a report on the state of the economy of the USSR. The official cause of death was a heart attack, but there is still talk of poisoning.
If I had to live all over again, I would start the way I started.
F. E. Dzerzhinsky was buried at the Kremlin wall. Soviet propaganda idealized the image of the head of the Cheka, but in the late 80s, articles appeared that opened some pages of his life and debunked the myth. In August 1991, symbolically, as a sign of the end of the era of socialism, the monument to Dzerzhinsky on Lubyanka Square was demolished.
"Either saints or scoundrels can serve in the organs."
“He who becomes cruel and whose heart remains insensitive towards the prisoners must leave here. Here, as in no other place, one must be kind and noble.” ( Felix Dzerzhinsky)
"The Cheka is terrifying because of its merciless repression and complete impenetrability to anyone's gaze." ( Nikolai Krylenko)
“As long as the incompetent and even simply ignorant in matters of production, technology, etc., bodies and investigators will fester in prisons of technicians and engineers on charges of some kind of ridiculous, ignorant people invented crimes - “technical sabotage” or “economic espionage” foreign capital will not go to Russia for any serious work ... We will not establish a single serious concession and commercial enterprise in Russia unless we give some definite guarantees against the arbitrariness of the Cheka. ( Leonid Krasin)
“Our enemies created whole legends about the all-seeing eyes of the Cheka, about the ubiquitous ones. They imagined them as some kind of huge army. They did not understand what the strength of the Cheka was. And it consisted in the same thing as the strength of the Communist Party - in the complete confidence of the working masses. “Our strength is in the millions,” said Felix Edmundovich. The people believed the Chekists and helped them in the fight against the enemies of the revolution. Dzerzhinsky's assistants were not only Chekists, but thousands of vigilant Soviet patriots. ( Fedor Fomin, Notes of an Old Chekist)
“Dear Vladimir Ilyich! Maintaining good relations with Turkey is impossible as long as the current actions of the Chekists on the Black Sea coast continue. Because of this, a number of conflicts have already arisen with America, Germany and Persia ... The Black Sea Chekists quarrel with us in turn with all the powers whose representatives fall into the area of their operations. Agents of the Cheka, invested with unlimited power, do not reckon with any rules. ( Letter from Georgy Chicherin to Vladimir Lenin)
“Arrest the lousy Chekists and bring the guilty to Moscow and shoot them.<…>We will always support you if Gorbunov manages to bring the KGB bastard under execution.” ( From Lenin's answer to Chicherin)
Diploma to the badge "Honored Worker of the NKVD". (wikipedia.org)
“Blinded by the burgeoning personality cult of Stalin, many employees of the organs began to lose their bearings and could not distinguish where the Leninist line ended and something completely alien to it began. Gradually, most of them fell under the influence of Yagoda and became an obedient tool in his hands, performing tasks that deviated more and more from the line of Lenin-Dzerzhinsky.
“Gradually, I learned from my subordinates more and more details about the black deeds perpetrated by the workers of the Novosibirsk NKVD. In particular, that Gorbach ordered the arrest and execution as German spies of almost all former soldiers and officers who were held captive in Germany during the First World War (there were about 25,000 of them in the vast Novosibirsk region at that time). About the terrible torture and beatings that the arrested were subjected to during the investigation. I was also told that the former regional prosecutor, who arrived at the UNKVD to check cases, was immediately arrested and committed suicide by jumping out of a window from the fifth floor.”
“Most of the old Chekists were convinced that with the arrival of Yezhov in the NKVD, we would finally return to the traditions of Dzerzhinsky, get rid of the unhealthy atmosphere and careerist, disintegrating and lipish tendencies implanted in last years in the organs of Yagoda. After all, Yezhov, as secretary of the Central Committee, was close to Stalin, in whom we then believed, and we believed that the organs would now have a firm and faithful hand of the Central Committee. At the same time, most of us believed that Yagoda, as a good administrator and organizer, would bring order to the People's Commissariat of Communications and bring great benefits there.
These hopes of yours were not destined to come true. Soon such a wave of repressions began, to which not only the Trotskyites and Zinovievists were subjected, but also the workers of the NKVD, who were badly fighting them. ( Mikhail Shreider, “NKVD from the inside. Notes of the Chekist ")
Yezhov caricature. Boris Efimov, 1937. (wikipedia.org)
“Both in Soviet times, and in modern times, one could join the ranks of the “Chekists” only if they had excellent physical and mental health. This is no coincidence. In this profession, “professional use” and “professional harm” alternate every now and then, sometimes colliding with each other. With such collisions, good health is indispensable. ” ( Eugene Sapiro, "Treatise on Luck")
“I am still sure that among the Chekists 20 percent are idiots, and the rest are just cynics.” ( From an interview with Gabriel Superfin)
The revolutionary and head of the Cheka, Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, argued: "A real Chekist must have a cold mind, a warm heart and clean hands." We have to agree with almost all of this. modern man. How to achieve yours? What is a happy life?
Cool head and success in life
What does a young man not have when he embarks on the path of life? Cold head. His actions are often guided by emotions, impulses, moods and momentary desires. When we are young, we rush from side to side, we grab everything in a row and do not know what to do.
We create problems for ourselves, and then we bravely solve them. We get involved in things we shouldn't be involved in. We start dating a girl who is clearly not suitable, and everything should end badly. We go to work where we shouldn't. We say things that were best kept secret. We ignore growing problems rather than solve them. We are slowly sinking, but stubbornly ignoring it.
In life, most people lack wisdom, prudence and forethought. Why eat junk food and then desperately fight it? Why drink and smoke, and then complain about how you feel? Why get involved in a drunken fight, and then excuse the cops? Why look for girls in clubs if the percentage of good girls there is minimal? Why go or stay at a job where there are no prospects at all?
Most of the problems in life are due to the fact that we never think a few steps ahead. We succumb to desires and whims, and then rake in problems and troubles. A cool head would help us avoid many difficulties and soften the impact of imminent disasters. Wisdom and foresight are good qualities about which little is said.
Warm heart and success in life
When we are young, the fire inside us burns so strongly that we are ready to conquer the world. But with age, the fire and enthusiasm gradually goes out. We try new things less and less, we almost never get out of our comfort zone, and we never take risks. You might think that we are becoming wiser, but in 99% of cases the reasons are different. This is sheer cowardice and laziness.
Adults often lack a fiery and hot heart. We stopped trying, taking risks, and moving forward. We just go with the flow. When was the last time you did something you really needed? You stopped making attempts or make them too rarely.
What is the difference between a happy and successful person and a loser? In the number of attempts. Even mediocre people get their way if they are very persistent. And if you have potential, then why do you just wait and rarely make attempts to change your life? Many people make more attempts in a year than you do in a lifetime. Every day they look for their way, meet girls and educate themselves. You lack a warm heart.
Clean hands and success in life
Modern man must have a cold head, a warm heart and callused hands.
Original taken from nampuom_pycu in Felix Edmundovich Yosefovich, from the estate of Dzerzhinovo, Oshmyany district, Vilna province.
Shirt guy.
Born on August 30 (September 11), 1877 in the Dzerzhinovo estate of the Oshmyany district of the Vilna province in a wealthy family. The fourth of eight children of the nobleman Edmund-Rufin Yozefovich and Elena Ignatievna Yanushevskaya. Mother is Polish, father is Jewish. The history of the creation of this family is quite unusual: twenty-five-year-old home teacher Edmund Yosefovich, who undertook to teach the exact sciences to the daughters of Professor Yanushevsky, seduced 14-year-old Elena. A pedophile and a student were quickly married and under the pretext "Elenina studying at one of the best European colleges" out of sight sent to Taganrog. Edmund got a job at a local gymnasium (where Anton Chekhov was one of his students). The children went ... And the family soon returned to their homeland.
The future Chekist was born like this. Pregnant Elena Ignatievna did not notice the open cellar hatch and fell through. The same night a boy was born. The birth was difficult, but the baby was born wearing a shirt, so he was named Felix ("Happy").
He was five years old when his father died of consumption, and his 32-year-old mother was left with eight children. According to Dzerzhinsky's biographers, he was a child prodigy as a child. Indeed: from the age of six I read in Polish, from the age of seven - in Russian and in Jewish. But Felix studied average. I stayed in the first grade for the second year. The future head of the government of Poland, Joseph (Józef) Pilsudski, who studied at the same gymnasium (in 1920, his "iron" classmate will swear to personally shoot the "Pilsudski's dog" after the capture of Warsaw) noted that "the schoolboy Dzerzhinsky is dullness, mediocrity, without any bright abilities." Felix did well in only one subject - the Law of God, he even dreamed of becoming a priest, but soon "disappointed" in religion.
The mother raised her children in hostility to everything Russian, Orthodox, talking about Polish "patriots" who were hanged, shot or driven to Siberia. Dzerzhinsky later admitted: “As a boy, I dreamed of a cap of invisibility and the destruction of all Muscovites.”
The family tragedy of the Jozefovichs was the death of Felix's 12-year-old sister Wanda, whom he accidentally shot with a hunting rifle.
In such families, they usually strive from childhood to study and knowledge, and then to open their own business. But Felix began to spin love affairs early. Lost interest in studies. Once he insulted and publicly slapped a German teacher, for which he was expelled from the gymnasium. He got close to criminals, worked in underground circles of Jewish youth, took part in fights, posted anti-government leaflets around the city. In 1895 he joined the Lithuanian Social Democratic group.
Childhood is over.
After reading Marx.
After the death of his mother, Felix received 1000 rubles of inheritance and quickly drank them in local pubs (he did not appear at the funeral, and in general he did not remember either his mother or father, either in letters or verbally, as if they did not exist at all), where for days with the same loafers, who had read Marx, he discussed plans for building a society in which it would be possible not to work.
The husband of Aldona's older sister, having learned about the "tricks" of his brother-in-law, kicked him out of the house, and Felix began the life of a professional revolutionary. He creates "boyuvki" - groups of armed youth (among his associates of that time, for example, the famous Bolshevik Antonov-Ovseenko). They incite the workers to armed riot, crack down on strikebreakers, organize terrorist attacks with dozens of victims. In the spring of 1897, Felix's “warfare” crippled a group of workers who did not want to strike with iron bars, and he was forced to flee to Kovno (Kaunas).
... The Kovno police received an intelligence report about the appearance in the city of a suspicious young man in a black hat, always pulled low over his eyes, in a black suit. He was seen in the pub, where he treated the workers from the Tillmans factory. During interrogation, they testified: the stranger had a conversation with them about committing a riot at the factory, in case of refusal he threatened to beat them severely.
On July 17, during the arrest, the young man called himself Edmund Zhebrovsky, but it soon became clear that he was "pillar nobleman Dzerzhinsky." (Subsequently his nicknames: iron felix, FD, red executioner, bloody; underground aliases: Jacek, Jakub, bookbinder, Franek, astronomer, Jozef, Domansky.) Having failed to prove his personal participation in numerous bloody showdowns (the accomplices did not betray him!), But after all, after spending a year in prison, he was exiled for three years to the Vyatka province. “Both in his views and in his behavior,” the gendarmerie colonel prophetically reported to the Vilna prosecutor, “a person in the future is very dangerous, capable of all crimes.” Biographers, describing the next period of Dzerzhinsky's life, get off with general phrases: "he conducted explanatory work among the masses", "fieryly spoke at meetings." If! This was a man of action. In 1904, in the city of New Alexandria, he tried to raise an armed uprising, the signal for which would be a terrorist attack in a military unit. Felix planted dynamite in the officers' meeting, but at the last moment his henchman chickened out and did not detonate the bomb. I had to run over the fence.
According to Felix’s militants, they mercilessly killed everyone who was suspected of having connections with the police: “We began to suspect Bloody, and he began to hide from us. We caught him and questioned him all night. Then the judges came. At dawn, we took Bloody to the Powazki cemetery and shot him there.” One of Felix’s close associates, the militant A. Petrenko, recalled: “There were no hunters to risk their lives in the face of militants who quickly cracked down on suspects. The massacre of traitors and secret agents was a matter of prime necessity. Such episodes, which occurred almost daily, were surrounded by guarantees of the justice of the execution. The situation was such that now it is possible to condemn someone for these massacres” (RTSKHIDNI, fund 76).
Dzerzhinsky dealt with the so-called Black Hundreds with particular cruelty. He somehow decided that a Jewish pogrom was being prepared by the residents of house No. 29 on Tamke Street, and sentenced everyone to death. He himself described this massacre in his newspaper Chervonny Shtandart: “Our comrades carried out this on November 24th. 6 people entered the apartment along Tamka through the main entrance and 4 from the kitchen with demands not to move. Met them with gunfire; some of the gang tried to flee. There was no way to do otherwise than to resolutely pay off the criminals: time did not wait, danger threatened our comrades. In the apartment on Tamka, six or seven leaders of the "Black Hundred" fell. (Same fund.)
And what is interesting: Dzerzhinsky was arrested six times (both with a gun in his hands and with a lot of one hundred percent material evidence), but for some reason he was not tried, but expelled administratively, as they did with cheap prostitutes and parasites. Why? There is evidence that the main reason is the weak evidence base. Witnesses of his crimes were killed by his comrades-in-arms, judges and prosecutors were intimidated. According to Dzerzhinsky's own recollections, he "paid off with a bribe." (Sverchkov D. Krasnaya Nov. 1926. No. 9.) And where does he get such money from? And in general, what kind of chishi did he live on?
Party Gold.
Judging by the expenses, Dzerzhinsky disposed of considerable money. In the photographs of those years, he is in expensive dandy suits, patent leather shoes. Travels around Europe, lives in the best hotels and sanatoriums in Zakopane, Radom, St. Petersburg, Krakow, rests in Germany, Italy, France, conducts active correspondence with his mistresses. On May 8, 1903, he writes from Switzerland: “I am again in the mountains above Lake Geneva, breathing clean air and eating great food.” Later he tells his sister from Berlin: “I traveled the world. It's been a month since I left Capri, I've been to the Italian and French Riviera, Monte Carlo, and even won 10 francs; then he admired the Alps in Switzerland, the mighty Jungfrau and other snowy colossi, burning with a glow at sunset. What a beautiful world! (The same fund, inventory 4, file 35.)
All this required enormous costs. In addition, huge sums were spent on the salaries of the militants (Dzerzhinsky paid 50 rubles a month each, while the average worker received 3 rubles), on the publication of newspapers, proclamations, leaflets, on the organization of congresses, the release of revolutionaries on bail, bribes to police officers , forgery of documents and much more. A cursory acquaintance with his expenses shows: annually hundreds of thousands of rubles. Who financed it?
According to one of the versions, her enemies did not spare money for organizing the unrest in Russia, according to another, the expropriation of the contents of banks, simply a robbery, was the gold-bearing vein ...
Iron tailor and social-sexual.
When asked if he was subjected to repression for revolutionary activities before the October Revolution, the “first Chekist” wrote in the questionnaire: “He was arrested in 97, 900, 905, 906, 908 and 912, spent only 11 years in prison, including hard labor(8 plus 3), was exiled three times, always fled.” But for what crimes - silence. It is known from books: on May 4, 1916, the Moscow Judicial Chamber sentenced him to 6 years of hard labor. But not a word about the fact that under the tsarist regime only murderers were sentenced to hard labor ...
The February revolution found Dzerzhinsky in the Butyrka prison. Like a child, he rejoiced that he had learned to sew on a sewing machine and even for the first time in his life earned 9 rubles by sewing cellmates. In his free time, he played the fool and spied on the women from the neighboring cell through a hole in the wall. (“Women danced, staged live pictures. Then they demanded the same from men. We stood in such a place and in such a position so that they could see ...” Y. Krasny-Rotshtadt.)
On March 1, 1917, Felix was released. He left Butyrka barely alive - the cellmates, having convicted the head of the prison of knocking, severely beat him. However, he did not return to Poland. For some time he hung around Moscow, and then he left for Petrograd. What is interesting: leaving the casemate with holey pockets and in a hat with fish fur, he soon begins to send his mistress Sofya Mushkat to Switzerland 300 rubles a month to a credit bank in Zurich. And he conducts all correspondence and forwarding through Germany, which is hostile to Russia! ..
THIEF. (Great October Revolution).
Immediately after the February Revolution (as soon as it smelled of fried!) Political adventurers, international terrorists, crooks and swindlers of all stripes come to Russia from all over the world. The July attempt to seize power by the Bolsheviks fails miserably. In August, the VI Congress of the Bolsheviks gathers ... Dzerzhinsky, who dreamed of “killing all Muscovites” as a child, suddenly decides to rid them of the exploiters. And although he was never a Bolshevik, he was immediately elected to the Central Committee of the party and arranged a secret meeting with Lenin hiding in Razliv.
Former political enemies (Bolsheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries, etc.) unite for a time into a united front and by common efforts on November 7 (October 25, O.S.) capture the captain's bridge of the Russian Empire. At first they swore that they came to power only before the congress of the Constituent Assembly, but as soon as the deputies arrived in Petrograd, they were simply dispersed. “There is no morality in politics,” Lenin declared, “but there is only expediency.”
Dzerzhinsky played an active role in the seizure of power. “Lenin has become completely insane, and if someone has influence on him, it’s only“ Comrade Felix ”. Dzerzhinsky is an even bigger fanatic,” wrote People's Commissar Leonid Krasin, “and, in essence, a cunning beast, intimidating Lenin with counter-revolution and the fact that it will sweep us all away and him first. And Lenin, I was finally convinced of this, is a real coward, trembling for his own skin. And Dzerzhinsky plays on this string ... "
After October, Lenin sent the eternally dirty, unshaven, constantly dissatisfied "iron Felix" to the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs as a person who knows the criminal world and prison life. There he sent everyone whose heads were already cut by prison machines ...
On December 7, 1917, the Council of People's Commissars hastily creates the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage. And although this commission is assigned the role of an investigative committee, the sanctions of its members are much wider: “Measures - confiscation, expulsion, deprivation of cards, publication of lists of enemies of the people, etc.” According to Latsis (he headed the department of the Cheka for the fight against counter-revolution. - Ed.), "Felix Edmundovich himself asked for a job in the Cheka." He quickly gets up to speed, and if in December he himself often goes to searches and arrests, then at the beginning of 1918, having occupied a vast building with cellars and basements on the Lubyanka, he begins to personally form a team.
Mokrushnik number 1.
The first statistically official victim of the Chekists is considered to be a certain Prince Eboli, who "on behalf of the Cheka, robbed bourgeois in restaurants." Since his execution, the countdown of the victims of the totalitarian regime began. Under the verdict is the signature of Felix Dzerzhinsky.
... Known fact. In 1918, at one of the meetings of the Council of People's Commissars, where the issue of supply was discussed, Lenin sent a note to Dzerzhinsky: "How many malicious counter-revolutionaries do we have in prisons?" The first Chekist wrote on a piece of paper: "About 1500." He did not know the exact number of those arrested - they put anyone in jail without understanding. Vladimir Ilyich chuckled, put a cross next to the figure, and handed the paper back. Felix Edmundovich left.
That same night, "about 1,500 malicious counter-revolutionaries" were put up against the wall. Later, Lenin's secretary Fotieva explained: “There was a misunderstanding. Vladimir Ilyich did not want to be shot at all. Dzerzhinsky did not understand him. Our leader usually puts a cross on the note as a sign that he has read it and taken note of it.
In the morning, both pretended that nothing extraordinary had happened. The Council of People's Commissars discussed a paramount issue: a long-awaited train with food was approaching Moscow.
The former commissar of the Cheka, V. Belyaev, who fled abroad, published the names of the “counter-revolutionaries” in his book. “List of executed, starved to death, tortured, stabbed to death, strangled scientists and writers: Khristina Alchevskaya, Leonid Andreev, Konstantin Arsentiev, Val. Bianchi, prof. Alexander Borozdin, Nikolai Velyaminov, Semyon Vengerov, Alexei and Nikolai Veselovsky, L. Vilkina - wife of N. Minsky, historian Vyazigin, prof. physicist Nicholas Gezehus, prof. Vladimir Gessen, astronomer Dm. Dubyago, prof. Mich. Dyakonov, geologist Alexander Inostrantsev, prof. economics Andrey Isaev, political economist Nikolai Kablukov, economist Alexander Kaufman, philosopher of law Bogdan Kostyakovsky, O. Lemm, novelist Dm. Lieven, historian Dmitry Kobeko, physicist A. Kolli, novelist S. Kondrushkin, historian Dm. Korsakov, prof. S. Kulakovsky, historian Iv. Luchitsky, historian I. Malinovsky, prof. V. Matveev, historian Petr Morozov, prof. Kazan University Darius Naguevsky, prof. Bor. Nikolsky, literary historian Dm. Ovsyannikov-Kulikovsky, prof. Joseph Pokrovsky, botanist V. Polovtsev, prof. D. Radlov, philosopher Vas. Rozanov, prof. O. Rozenberg, poet A. Roslavlev, prof. F. Rybakov, prof. A. Speransky, Cl. Timiryazev, prof. Tugan-Baranovsky, prof. B. Turaev, prof. K. Fochsh, prof. A. Chess ... and many others, you, Lord, weigh their names.
This was just the beginning. Soon even more famous people of Russia will be added to these names.
In the first years of my work as an investigator, I managed to catch alive the first Chekists, demoted to the police for sins. Old veterans were sometimes frank: “I remember that they caught several suspicious types - and in the Cheka. They put on a bench, in the yard, a car engine to the fullest, so that passersby would not hear the shots. The commissioner approaches: you, bastard, will you confess? Raz a bullet in the belly! They ask others: do you bastards have something to confess to the Soviet government? Those on their knees ... They even told what was not there. And how searches were carried out! We drive up to the house on Tverskoy Boulevard. Night. We surround. And all the apartments ... All the valuables in the office, the bourgeoisie in the basement on the Lubyanka! .. That was work! And what about Dzerzhinsky? He shot himself."
In 1918, the Chekist detachments consisted of sailors and Latvians. One such sailor entered the chairman's office drunk. He made a remark, the sailor in response overlaid with a three-story one. Dzerzhinsky pulled out a revolver and, having put the sailor on the spot with several shots, he immediately fell in an epileptic fit.
In the archives, I dug up the protocol of one of the first meetings of the Cheka on February 26, 1918: “We heard about the act of Comrade Dzerzhinsky. Decided: the responsibility for the act bears himself and he alone, Dzerzhinsky. Henceforth, all decisions on executions are decided in the Cheka, and decisions are considered positive with half the members of the commission, and not personally, as was the case with Dzerzhinsky's act. From the text of the resolution it is clear: Dzerzhinsky shot personally. I did not manage to find out the names of those who were shot, and, apparently, no one will be able to, but one thing is clear - in those days it was a misdemeanor at the level of a childish prank.
Felix and his team.
Dzerzhinsky's faithful assistant and deputy was Yakov Peters - with a mane of black hair, a depressed nose, a large narrow-lipped mouth and cloudy eyes. He flooded the Don, Petersburg, Kyiv, Kronstadt, Tambov with blood. Another deputy, Martyn Sudrabs, is better known under the pseudonym Latsis. This pearl belongs to him: “The established customs of war ... according to which prisoners are not shot and so on, all this is ridiculous. Slaughter all the prisoners in the battles against you - that's the law of civil war. Latsis covered Moscow, Kazan, Ukraine with blood. A member of the Board of the Cheka, Alexander Eiduk, did not hide the fact that the murder for him was a sexual ecstasy. Contemporaries remembered his pale face, a broken arm and a Mauser in the other. The head of the Special Department of the Cheka, Mikhail Kedrov, ended up in a lunatic asylum already in the 1920s. Prior to that, he and his mistress Rebekah Meisel imprisoned children aged 8-14 and shot them under the pretext of class struggle. Georgiy Atarbekov, the “plenipotentiary representative of the Cheka”, was especially cruel. In Pyatigorsk, with a detachment of Chekists, he chopped up about a hundred captured hostages with swords, and personally stabbed General Ruzsky with a dagger. During the retreat from Armavir, he shot several thousand Georgians in the KGB cellars - officers, doctors, sisters of mercy, returning to their homeland after the war. When the Wrangel detachment approached Ekaterinodar, he ordered about two thousand more prisoners to be placed against the wall, most of whom were not guilty of anything.
In Kharkov, the name of Chekist Saenko was horrifying. This frail, obviously mentally ill man with a nervously twitching cheek, stuffed with drugs, ran around the prison on Cold Mountain, covered in blood. When the whites entered Kharkov and dug up the corpses, most of them had broken ribs, broken legs, chopped off heads, all had traces of torture with red-hot iron.
In Georgia, the commandant of the local "emergency" Shulman, a drug addict and homosexual, was distinguished by pathological cruelty. Here is how an eyewitness describes the execution of 118 people: “The condemned were lined up in ranks. Shulman and his assistant with guns in their hands went along the line, shooting in the forehead of the condemned, stopping from time to time to load the revolver. Not everyone dutifully shook their heads. Many fought, cried, shouted, asked for mercy. Sometimes Shulman's bullet only wounded them, the wounded were immediately finished off with shots and bayonets, and the dead were thrown into the pit. This whole scene went on for at least three hours.”
And what were the atrocities of Aron Kogan (better known under the pseudonym Bela Kun), Unshlikht, the dwarf and sadist Deribas, investigators of the Cheka Mindlin and Baron Pilyar von Pilhau. KGB women did not lag behind men: Zemlyachka in Crimea, Gromova in Yekaterinoslavl, "Comrade Rosa" in Kiev, Bosch in Penza, Yakovlev and Stasova in Petrograd, Ostrovskaya in Odessa. In the same Odessa, for example, the Hungarian Remover arbitrarily shot 80 arrested people. Subsequently, she was declared mentally ill on the basis of sexual perversion.
Did Dzerzhinsky know about the atrocities committed on behalf of the Soviet government by his henchmen? Based on the analysis of hundreds of documents, he certainly knew and encouraged.
It was he who signed most of the search warrants and arrest warrants, his signature is on the verdicts, he wrote secret instructions on the total recruitment of secret agents and secret agents in all spheres of society. “You must always remember the methods of the Jesuits, who did not make noise to the whole square about their work and did not flaunt it,” the “iron Felix” taught in secret orders, “but were secretive people who knew about everything and only knew how to act ...” The main direction of work He considers Chekists secret information and requires everyone to recruit as many secret agents as possible. “In order to acquire secret employees,” Dzerzhinsky teaches, “it is necessary to have a constant and lengthy conversation with the arrested, as well as their relatives and friends ... Interest in full rehabilitation in the presence of compromising material obtained by searches and undercover information ... Take advantage of discord in the organization and quarrels between individuals ... Interest financially.
What kind of provocations did he not push his subordinates with his instructions!
A White Guard detachment raids Khmelnitsk. The Bolsheviks were arrested, they were led through the whole city, urged on with kicks and rifle butts. The walls of the houses are dotted with appeals calling to sign up for the White Guard ... But in reality it turned out that all this was a provocation of the Chekists who decided to identify the enemies of the Soviet regime. The Communists paid with fake bruises, but those who were immediately identified by the whole list were put to waste.
The scope of the repressions only in 1918 is evidenced by official statistics published in the Cheka itself in those years: “245 uprisings were suppressed, 142 counter-revolutionary organizations were uncovered, 6,300 people were shot.” Of course, the Chekists were obviously modest here. According to the calculations of independent sociologists, several million were actually killed.
Legends and myths of the USSR.
Much has been written about how Dzerzhinsky worked to the point of wear and tear and did not show up to doctors in principle. Allegedly, even the Politburo was asked about the state of health of the chairman of the GPU. In fact, more than anything in the world, Felix Edmundovich loved and valued his own health. The archives contain hundreds of documents confirming this.
What kind of diseases he did not find in himself: tuberculosis, bronchitis, trachoma, and stomach ulcers. Where he just was not treated, in what sanatoriums he did not rest. Becoming chairman of the Cheka-GPU, he went to the best rest houses several times a year. Kremlin doctors constantly examine him: they find “bloating and recommend enemas”, but the conclusion about his next analysis is “spermatozoa were found in Comrade Dzerzhinsky’s morning urine ...”. Every day he is given coniferous baths, and the KGB officer Olga Grigorieva is personally responsible for ensuring that "enemies of the proletariat do not mix poison into the water."
According to colleagues, Dzerzhinsky ate poorly and drank “empty boiling water or some kind of surrogate. Like everyone else ... ”(Chekist Yan Buikis), and he strove to give the daily ration of bread to a guard or a mother of many children on the street.
“Felix Edmundovich was sitting, bending over the papers. He cordially rose to meet unexpected guests. On the edge of the table in front of him stood an unfinished glass of cold tea, on a saucer - a small piece of black bread.
- And what's that? Sverdlov asked. - No appetite?
“I have an appetite, but there is not enough bread in the republic,” Dzerzhinsky joked. “So we stretch the rations for the whole day ...”
I will quote only two documents. Here, for example, is what the Kremlin doctors recommended to Dzerzhinsky:
"1. White meat is allowed - chicken, turkey, hazel grouse, veal, fish;
2. Avoid black meat; 3. Greens and fruits; 4. Any flour dishes; 5. Avoid mustard, pepper, hot spices.
And here is the menu. Dzerzhinsky:
“Mon. Game consommé, fresh salmon, Polish cauliflower;
Tue. Mushroom solyanka, veal cutlets, spinach with egg;
Wednesday. Asparagus soup, bully beef, Brussels sprouts;
Thursday Boyar stew, steam sterlet, greens, peas;
Fri. Puree from flowers cabbage, sturgeon, maitre d' beans;
Saturday. Sterlet ear, turkey with pickles (urine apple, cherry, plum), mushrooms in sour cream;
Sunday Fresh champignon soup, marengo chicken, asparagus. (The fund is the same, inventory 4.)
Trotsky recalled that after the seizure of power, he and Lenin gorged themselves on caviar, that “it is not only in my memory that the first years of the revolution are colored with this unchanging caviar.”
Red terrorists.
In May 1918, 20-year-old Yakov Blyumkin entered the Cheka, who was immediately entrusted with the leadership of the department for combating German espionage.
On July 6, Blyumkin and N. Andreev arrive at Denezhny Lane, where the German embassy was located, and present a mandate for the right to negotiate with the ambassador. Signed on paper by Dzerzhinsky, Ksenofontov's secretary, registration number, stamp and seal.
During the conversation, Blumkin shoots at the ambassador, detonates two grenades, and the "diplomats" themselves hide in confusion. An unprecedented international scandal flares up. Dzerzhinsky, without blinking an eye, declares that his signature was forged on the mandate ... But there is no doubt that everything was organized by him. Firstly, he is categorically against peace with Germany (large-scale operations were planned against Germany). Secondly, the Bolsheviks needed a pretext for reprisals against the Socialist-Revolutionaries (it was they who were declared the murderers of the ambassador). And thirdly, Yakov Blyumkin was promoted for all these little things.
On July 8, Pravda published a statement by Dzerzhinsky: “In view of the fact that I am undoubtedly one of the main witnesses in the case of the murder of the German envoy Count Mirbach, I do not consider it possible for myself to remain in the Cheka ... as its chairman, as well as take any part in the commission at all. I ask the Council of People's Commissars to release me."
No one was involved in the investigation of the murder, no handwriting examination was carried out regarding the authenticity of the signature, and yet the Central Committee of the party removes him from his post. True, not for long. Already on August 22, Felix "rises from the ashes" - he occupies his former chair. And on time. On the night of August 24-25, the Cheka arrested more than a hundred prominent figures of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, accusing them of counter-revolution and terrorism. In response, on August 30, Leonid Kanegisser killed the chairman of the Petrograd "emergency" Moisei Uritsky. Dzerzhinsky personally travels to Petrograd and orders 1,000 people to be shot in revenge.
On August 30, Lenin is shot. Chekists accuse Socialist-Revolutionary Fanny Kaplan of assassination. Dzerzhinsky gives the green light to a massacre in Moscow.
Great family man.
And now let's dwell on a private moment in the life of a person "with clean hands and a warm heart." The moment the country is in the ring civil war and the “Red Terror” was declared, when concentration camps were being created at an accelerated pace, and a wave of wholesale arrests swept over the state, Dzerzhinsky, under the fictitious name Domansky, suddenly went abroad.
“At the insistence of Lenin and Sverdlov, in October 1918, exhausted by inhuman tension, he left for several days in Switzerland, where his family was,” the Chekist P. Malkov, commandant of the Kremlin, would later write.
Did Felix have a family? Indeed, at the end of August 1910, 33-year-old Felix made a trip with 28-year-old Sofya Muskat to the famous resort of Zakopane. On November 28, Sophia left for Warsaw, and they never met again.
On June 23, 1911, her son Jan was born, whom she handed over to an orphanage, as the child suffered from a mental disorder. The question arises: if they considered themselves husband and wife, why shouldn't Mushkat come to Russia, where the husband is far from the last person? Why did he go himself, risking falling into the clutches of special services, foreign police or emigrants? The most striking thing is that he is not going anywhere, but to Germany, where the public demanded immediate and severe punishment for the murderers of Mirbach, and where, of course, no one believed in the fairy tale about the villainous Socialist-Revolutionaries.
There were no official announcements about Dzerzhinsky's upcoming tour. True, it is known that with him was a member of the Board of the Cheka and the secretary of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, V. Avanesov, who could take "comrade Domansky" under his protection in case of any complications.
At my request, the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs checked the issuance of visas for leaving Russia in September-October 1918. There are no documents for the departure of Dzerzhinsky-Domansky and Avanesov. Therefore, the trip was illegal. For what purpose they left, one can only guess, but that they did not go on a pleasure trip and not empty-handed, one can not doubt. After all, Soviet "lemons" were not accepted for payment abroad. Even for using the toilet you had to pay with foreign currency. Where does the Chekists come from?
In September 1918, a Soviet diplomatic mission was opened in Switzerland. A certain Brightman was appointed its first secretary. He attaches Sofya Mushkat there, who takes her son Jan from the orphanage. Dzerzhinsky arrives in Switzerland and takes his family to the luxurious resort of Lugano, where he occupies the best hotel. In the photographs of that time, he is without a beard, in an expensive coat and suit, happy with life, the weather and his affairs. He left a soldier's tunic and a shabby overcoat in his office on the Lubyanka.
So for what purpose did Dzerzhinsky travel abroad? Let's turn to the facts. On November 5, the German government breaks off diplomatic relations with Soviet Russia and expels the Soviet embassy from Berlin. On November 9, under the threat of family murder, Wilhelm II abdicates the throne. November 11 revolution in Austria-Hungary (led by Bela Kun) overthrows the Habsburg monarchy.
For actions incompatible with diplomacy, the Swiss government expels the Soviet diplomatic mission, and Sophia Mushkat and the Brightmans are searched. In a letter to one of Dzerzhinsky's deputies, Ya. Berzin, who was the main executor of "revolutions" and political assassinations abroad, Lenin insists that foreign Zionists "Kater or Schneider from Zurich", Nubaker from Geneva, leaders of the Italian mafia, living in Lugano (!), demands not to spare gold for them and pay them “for work and travel generously”, “and distribute work to Russian fools, send clippings, not random numbers ...”.
Isn't that the key to the puzzle?
Not having time to gain a foothold in power, the Bolsheviks export the revolution abroad. To finance these revolutions, they could only give the loot - gold, jewelry, paintings by great masters. The transfer of all this could be entrusted only to the most "iron comrades". As a result, in a short time, almost the entire gold reserve of Russia was launched into the wind. And in the banks of Europe and America, accounts began to appear: Trotsky - 1 million dollars and 90 million Swiss francs; Lenin - 75 million Swiss francs; Zinoviev - 80 million Swiss francs; Ganetsky - 60 million Swiss francs and 10 million dollars; Dzerzhinsky - 80 million Swiss francs.
By the way, from the published letters of Dzerzhinsky to his sister Aldona, who lived in Vienna with her millionaire husband, it is clear that he even sent valuable things to her.
Born in a shirt, Dzerzhinsky really turned out to be a lucky man. He was lucky - he did not live up to the thirty-seventh year. Was not poisoned, shot, executed. He died a natural death, short of his forty-nineth birthday, on July 20, 1926 at 4:40 pm in his Kremlin apartment. A few hours later, the famous pathologist Abrikosov, in the presence of five more doctors, performed an autopsy of the body and found that death had occurred "from heart paralysis, which developed as a result of spasmodic closure of the lumen of the venous arteries." (RTSKHIDNI, fund 76, inventory 4, file 24.)
Created by Dzerzhinsky and his colleagues, the Cheka has grown into one of the most effective special services in the world, which was feared, hated and respected, including by the worst enemies of our country. But not only this, he went down in history. In addition to his Chekist activities, Dzerzhinsky became, perhaps, the most famous fighter against child homelessness in the history of our country.
Recently, disputes have not subsided about whether or not to return the monument to Felix Dzerzhinsky to the Lubyanka. If you want to better understand what kind of person the founder of the Cheka was, I bring to your attention his statements:
- To live - does not this mean to have an unshakable faith in victory?
- A Chekist must have a warm heart, a cold head and clean hands.
“He who becomes cruel and whose heart remains insensitive towards the prisoners must leave here. Here, as in no other place, you need to be kind and noble.
- A person can only sympathize with a social misfortune if he sympathizes with any specific misfortune of each individual person.
“Your task is enormous: to educate and mold the souls of your children. Be vigilant! For the fault or merit of children to a large extent falls on the head and conscience of the parents.
- Only such a remedy can correct, which will make the guilty realize that he acted badly, that he must live and act differently. The rod only works for a short time; when children grow up and cease to be afraid of her, conscience disappears with her.
– Fear will not teach children to distinguish good from evil; whoever fears pain will always succumb to evil.
“I am not preaching that we should isolate ourselves from abroad. This is complete absurdity. But we must create a favorable regime for the development of those industries that are vital and in which we can compete with them.
- In order for the state not to go bankrupt, it is necessary to solve the problem of state apparatuses. Uncontrollable swelling of the states, monstrous bureaucratization of every business - mountains of papers and hundreds of thousands of hacks; captures of large buildings and premises; car epidemic; millions of excesses. This is the legal feeding and devouring of state property by these locusts. In addition to this, unheard-of, shameless bribery, theft, negligence, blatant mismanagement, which characterizes our so-called "self-supporting", crimes pumping state property into private pockets.
- Where there is love, there is no suffering that could break a person. The real misfortune is selfishness. If you love only yourself, then with the advent of difficult life trials, a person curses his fate and experiences terrible torment. And where there is love and concern for others, there is no despair...
- He who has an idea and who is alive cannot be useless, unless he himself renounces his idea.
“Faith must be followed by works.
– In whatever difficult conditions you have to live, do not lose heart, because faith in your own strength and the desire to live for others is a huge strength.
– Life, a concrete practice, opens up new opportunities for us every day, so we need to start more not from paper, but from life.
“The worst enemy could not bring us as much harm as he brought with his nightmarish reprisals, executions, granting soldiers the right to rob towns and villages. He did all this in the name of our Soviet power, inciting the entire population against us. Plunder and violence - this was a deliberate military tactic, which, while giving us fleeting success, brought defeat and disgrace as a result. Dzerzhinsky about the Socialist-Revolutionary Mikhail Muravyov, April 1918.