By Guy Faulconbridge
MOSCOW, April 24 (Reuters) – President Vladimir Putin has ordered Russia’s Federal Security Service’s spy academy to carry the name of “Iron Felix” Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret police and architect of the Red Terror which followed the 1917 revolution.
Dzerzhinsky, a Polish noble-turned-revolutionary who helped lay the foundations of the repressive system over which Josef Stalin was to preside, is reviled by dissidents but is a hero to the spies who rule in Putin’s Russia.
After the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, a cheering crowd toppled a statue of him in the Polish capital Warsaw. As the Soviet Union itself crumbled in 1991, a monument to Dzerzhinsky outside the KGB headquarters on Lubyanka Square in Moscow was felled by jubilant demonstrators.
But “Iron Felix” is back at the FSB spy school less than two years after making a comeback to the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR).
In a decree published by the Kremlin this week, Putin ordered the FSB’s Academy, which used to be known as the KGB’s Higher School, to be known henceforth as the “F.E. Dzerzhinsky Academy of the Federal Security Service”.
Putin, himself a former KGB lieutenant colonel, said the decision had been taken because of Dzerzhinsky’s “outstanding contribution to ensuring state security”, according to the decree.
The KGB’s Higher School was formally known as the “F.E. Dzerzhinsky Higher School of the KGB” from 1962-1993, according to Russian media. Putin was a student there in 1979 and the early 1980s, according to an official biography.
The FSB academy in southern Moscow has faculties including foreign languages, information security, counterintelligence, operational support, applied mathematics, and special equipment.
LENIN’S LOYAL LIEUTENANT
For some Russians, the return of Dzerzhinsky is an indicator of the repression they say prevails in wartime Russia – and the extent to which the country has abandoned its post-Soviet pivot towards the West.
As one of Vladimir Lenin’s most loyal lieutenants, Dzerzhinsky helped establish the revolutionary government using ruthless Leninist tactics: the brutal persecution of opponents – or anyone even suspected of being an opponent.
As Lenin’s, and later Stalin’s, secret police chief from 1917 until his death in 1926, Dzerzhinsky led the campaign of intimidation, arrests, violence and executions which became known as the “Red Terror”.
He founded the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, known as the Cheka, which instituted a wave of summary executions during the Civil War.
Such is his enduring influence that even in modern Russia, some spies still call themselves Chekists, after the name of his spy apparatus, and refer to Dzerzhinsky as “Chekist no. 1”.
Some hope Dzerzhinsky will one day return to the FSB’s Lubyanka Square headquarters.
“After the return of Dzerzhinsky to the FSB Academy, many really await the return of Felix Edmundovich (Dzerzhinsky’s) statue to its rightful place on Lubyanka,” said Igor Korotchenko, editor-in-chief of the National Defence magazine.
(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)
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