Dzerzhinsky, Feliks Edmundovich

Dzerzhinsky, Feliks Edmundovich (1877-1926), chief of the first Soviet secret police, the Cheka (a predecessor agency to the KGB), and a prominent member of the Bolshevik government after the Russian Revolution of 1917 (see Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). Born into a noble family in Poland, Dzerzhinsky began revolutionary activities against the imperial government of Russia while a secondary school student in Vilnius, Lithuania. After joining the Lithuanian Social Democratic Party in 1895, he later adhered to the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). Dzerzhinsky had spent more than 11 years in tsarist prisons or exile by the time the Russian monarchy was toppled in the 1917 revolution. After the Bolshevik seizure of power, Lenin appointed Dzerzhinsky chairman of the Cheka, which was created to defend the new regime. Dzerzhinsky’s secret police agency soon acquired broad powers and employed ruthless measures to repress opposition. In the name of saving the revolution, the Cheka unleashed between 1918 and 1921 what came to be called the Red Terror, killing thousands of the Bolsheviks’ “class enemies”.

After March 1919 Dzerzhinsky combined the role of Cheka chairman with that of head of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (Russian acronym, NKVD), which controlled the regular police. In 1923 he gave up the NKVD appointment, and in 1924, while remaining chairman of the secret police (renamed the OGPU), he became chairman of the Supreme Council of National Economy (VSNKh). He was elected to candidate membership in the Communist Party’s highest ruling body, the Politburo, in 1924.

Known as Iron Feliks because of his strong self-discipline, Dzerzhinsky was an outstanding administrator who, like Lenin, had an absolute conviction that the Bolshevik cause justified any means. After his death in 1926 Dzerzhinsky became an official hero in the USSR.