A monument that looks like two peas in a pod to the bronze monument created by the famous sculptor Yevgeny Vuchetich and which has stood since 1958 in Lubyanka. The 39-year-old sculptor Vladimir Ivanov worked on its reconstruction using scanning and other more modern technologies. Happened! The monument is somewhat smaller. The height of the bronze statue in a coat is 10 meters 25 centimeters (Vuchetich’s original is one and a half meters higher), the height of the pedestal is 1 meter.
Dzerzhinsky, as he did then on the Lubyanka, looks to the northwest. The main enemy, as in his time, is still there. The danger comes from there.
And it is no coincidence that on December 20, 1920, Felix Edmundovich signed Order No. 169 on the creation of the Foreign Affairs Department of the Cheka, in common language INO, designed to combat external threats. The director of the SVR, Sergei Evgenievich Naryshkin, spoke about this at the opening of the monument, paying tribute to Dzerzhinsky, who created one of the most powerful intelligence services in the world.
For us today, for history, he is the founder of the Cheka. Iron, irreconcilable, sometimes ruthless. But only those he considered enemies. In letters to his wife and sister, Felix Edmundovich admitted and explained: “I have been promoted to the position of the front line of fire and my will is to fight and look with open eyes at all the dangers of a formidable situation and I myself will be merciless… To many, there is no heritage more terrible than mine…”
But do we remember, do we know about the other Dzerzhinsky? About “Iron Felix”, horrified by the creation of the Civil War: an army of five million unfortunate vagabonds. Three paths without choice were prepared for them: hunger, prison, death. Seven years after his superhuman work, 200,000 people were left homeless.
Russia, the great railway power, was left without transport after the war. He was charged with restoring what had been completely destroyed. And soon the locomotives, acquired by unknown routes, were driving along the newly laid rails. Transportation operations have been restored to 80 percent.
11 years of prison and exile can break anyone. The chairman of the Cheka was seriously ill: tuberculosis, heart disease. But he cared about the health of others. Well, did he or the entire country, struggling to escape poverty, care about sports? But one of the first sports societies, Dynamo, arose precisely according to Dzerzhinsky’s plan.
He was burning, exhausted, everyone saw it: friends, enemies, and, as always, the silent majority. He admitted: “But I am dissatisfied with myself. I see and feel that I could give more than I give.”
In his biography, studied far and wide, many secrets remain, secrets, not obscure spots. How did he decide, at the height of the Civil War, to go to Switzerland, where his wife and his son Jasik lived? And so: with a shaved head, without a beard. To the nobleman from an old Polish family, his elegant suit suited him no worse than his famous coat. Are you traveling for personal reasons? Or what we today call illegal intelligence? Perhaps the fulfillment of the most important task of Lenin, who gave permission for the trip?
He died at the age of 48, having achieved so much that could not be done in 100. The last words of Dzerzhinsky, whom doctors tried to put to bed in his apartment, were: “No need, I will do it myself.” .” And he fell dead.
