Seems that a couple of members of the Russian Duma are calling for the statue of the founder of the infamous Soviet Secret Police to be returned to its former spot outside the now former headquarters of the KGB.
The removal of the statue of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret police, from in front of KGB headquarters in Moscow was an iconic moment in the collapse of communism there in 1991, a step that many saw as a guarantee that the kind of repression he sponsored would never return.But yesterday, members of a Duma committee applauded a proposal by the country's former deputy procurator general to restore the statue of the first Chekist to its former place of honor, yet another indication of the way in which the political pendulum is swinging in the Russian Federation at the present time. - CommunistCrimes.Org
This guy was a real character and director of the murder of thousands:
Tens of thousands of political opponents were shot without trial in the basements of prisons and public places throughout Russia — and not only opponents. People who happened to be intellectuals, capitalists and priests were shot simply for who they were.
Dzerzhinsky himself boasted that: "We represent in ourselves organized terror -- this must be said very clearly." and “[The Red Terror involves] the terrorization, arrests and extermination of enemies of the revolution on the basis of their class affiliation or of their pre-revolutionary roles.” - Wikipedia
As if this development is not bad enough, it gets worse as currently in the general former (future) location of this statue currently stands a Memorial commemorating the victims of the political oppression in the USSR.
Memorial [Note: an NGO] had finally won permission to establish the monument it had first petitioned for in 1987: a large chunk of grey granite from the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea, site of the first large-scale camps for political prisoners after the Bolshevik Revolution. The granite had been unloaded in the little park of spruces on one side of Dzerzhinsky Square, about equidistant from the statue of Iron Felix and the Lubyanka doors. The Politburo had approved the idea of a memorial to the "thousands" of victims of the repression "of the 1930's, 1940's and early 1950's." But the inscription on the granite, as thousands of people filed past and laid down their roses or carnations, quietly insisted on two facts: that the victims could not be counted in the thousands, and that the repression did not begin in the 1930's nor end in the 1950's. "To the Memory" the inscription read "of the millions of Victims of the Totalitarian Regime." - Dismantling Utopia by Scott Shane, Pages 143-144
A couple months ago it was mentioned that the stone memorial was going to be 'temporarily' removed due to a construction project in the area. As I noted before here (Putin's Inconvenient Memorial) if the statue is removed, it might be the last time it is ever seen. Well, that would be more likely if the space where it is/was located is made unavailable by replacing a statue to one of the persons most responsible for creating all those victims.
Once again, Russia gets to play these silly/dangerous games because they were never forced to face the crimes that were committed by the country under the banner of the Soviet Union.
Once again, Russia gets to play these silly/dangerous games because they were never forced to face the crimes that were committed by the country under the banner of the Soviet Union.
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