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Oryol Governate prison, Oryol, Russian Empire. 1914

Here, at one of the biggest penal colonies of Tzarist Russia,

a revolutionary is held who is destined to become famous the world over.

All in all he'll spend 11 years incarcerated,

and he will dedicate his entire life to the cause.

He is still yet to become a legend of state security,

but even his first letters to his family show his iron will.

Felix Dzerzhinsky. Decades later,

they will call him the Knight of the Revolution and

the Apostle of Terror. He will be remembered as Iron Felix,

and his deeds will be the subject of heated discussions for many years.

But even the staunchest opponents of Dzerzhinsky agree

that he was a truly remarkable person.

LAND OF THE SOVIETS: FORGOTTEN LEADERS

FELIX DZERZHINSKY

Dzerzhinovo Mansion

Yelena Ignatyevna and Edmund Rufin Iosifovich

Dzerzhinovo village, Vilnius Province,

Russian Empire, September 11, 1877.

Felix means Happy in Latin.

That's what the Dzerzhinskys decided to call their son

after his mother started giving birth prematurely, but the boy

was born healthy despite the circumstances.

The Dzerzhinsky family was an old Polish nobility line,

but they weren't rich. They lived close to Vilnius,

in the Dzerzhinovo village. Like many other Poles,

Dzerzhinskys didn't consider themselves subjects of the Russian Tzar.

They only spoke Polish at home, and every Sunday,

they would go to mass to a Catholic church.

And they dreamed of their homeland's independence in secret.

Polish Kingdom.

At the start of the 19th century, the Polish Kingdom

was added to the Russian Empire.

After the suppression of the 1863 uprising, there was

a campaign of Russification of the population.

Polish was banned from use at schools, in public places,

in official correspondence. The ban included religious books in Polish,

and nobles and Catholics were being forced out

of governmental institutions.

At the age of ten, Felix enrolled into the 1st Vilnius Gymnasium.

This privileged school was famous for its strict rules,

and it counted the Russian prime minister Pyotr Stolypin

and the famous artist Vasily Kachalov among its alumni.

Felix was forced to repeat the first grade.

He spoke Russian badly and would talk back to the teachers.

Oftentimes he would spend the day in the disciplinary cell

instead of the classroom.

He was only interested in one class: Scripture Knowledge.

Dzerzhinsky's memoirs: “I was very religious,

“I was even going to go to the Roman Catholic seminary.

“But that never happened. When I was in 6th grade,

“a sudden change took place. I spent an entire year

“thinking about how there was no God and telling everybody about it.”

There are many legends surrounding Iron Felix's person,

and according to one of them, it was a freak accident that

shook the faith in the young man's soul.

Felix and his brother Stanislav were target practicing

with their father's rifle, and they accidentally shot their own sister,

who died on the spot.

According to a different version, Dzerzhinsky was disillusioned

with God's existence for a different reason:

one of his gymnasium friends had given him Karl Marx's works.

Karl Marx, German philosopher, economist.

The founder of Marxism, a theory of a just society

where all the ruling classes and private property are destroyed,

all the members of society are equal,

granted equal rights and opportunities. Marx's ideas resonated

with Social Democrats the world over.

Felix really did trade his faith in God to faith in Marxism,

but he never stopped being idealistic.

Having gotten a passion for revolutionary ideas,

Dzerzhinsky joined the Lithuanian Social Democratic Party

and dropped out of the gymnasium.

In his Kaunas apartment, a copying machine called a hectograph

began to operate. Using this underground typography,

Dzerzhinsky would print propaganda leaflets and

a newspaper called the Kaunas Worker, encouraging the workers

to fight for their rights.

On July 17, 1897, Felix was walking,

hiding a batch of fresh leaflets on him. He was planning to

secretly hand them over to his friend for him to pass them around

the factory. He was awaiting Dzerzhinsky at a park bench, but as soon

as Felix handed the young man the leaflets, policemen ran up to him.

The friend turned out to be a secret police informant.

The gendarmes tried to make Dzerzhinsky give up all of his

revolutionary connections, they demanded a “heartfelt confession,”

they deprived him of food, beat him with birch sticks, but he kept silent

and never gave any statements about any of his comrades.

Preliminary incarceration lasted for around a year.

In a note to his sister from the Kaunas prison, Felix adamantly

rejects her pitiful tone:

“You call me a 'poor soul' and you are greatly mistaken.

“I can say with conviction that I am much happier

“than those who lead pointless lives 'in freedom.'

“And if I had to choose between prison and a pointless life outside,

“I would choose the former, there would be no reason in existing otherwise.

“So even though I am in prison, I do not feel down.

“Prison is only horrible for the weak of heart.”

Dzerzhinsky was convicted to three years of exile

in the city of Nolinsk in the Vyatka Governorate

for distribution of illegal literature.

That's where he met Margarita Nikolaeva, the girl was in exile, too.

On Wednesdays she would hold Marxist club meetings at her home.

The two young people started to hold correspondence.

The exiled had to regularly check in at the local police department.

The procedure was formal, and usually, the record clerk

at the station would do it. But one day, Dzerzhinskly was asked

to see the police captain himself.

The local police department head demanded that Felix

stop the propaganda among the workers, and then started

The young man couldn't hold back his temper and called the captain

“a bastard and a scumbag.” For insulting a government functionary,

Dzerzhinsky was exiled 500 versts east of Nolinsk, to the village of

Kaigorodskoye in Slobodsky Uyezd.

Kaigorodskoye, Vyatka Governate, Russian Empire. 1899

From time to time, Dzerzhinsky would go to the woods for a few days

to fish and hunt, and the local police quickly

got used to these long absences. That's what started an escape plan.

One time, the young revolutionary never returned to the village.

The policemen only announced the alarm on day 7,

sending out telegrams about an exiled person running away.

But it was too late. Felix had already reached

the nearest train station by boat.

From there, he went to Vyatka, and in the same year of 1899,

he reached Warsaw.

Later, exiled yet again, Dzerzhinsky would write Margarita:

“By rights, we should not correspond at all,

“for it will only aggravate both you and myself.

“I am a rogue, and making friends with a rogue spells grief for you.

“I beg of you, do not write to me at all.”

And so Dzerzhinsky's illegal life started.

At daytime, he would hide in safehouses,

write leaflets and articles. He would only go out into the street

at night to speak in front of the workers.

When Dzerzhinsky was put in charge of the secret police,

his experience with illegal work would come in handy

for finding and arresting criminals.

Soon, he was arrested again.

He spent two years in prison, and in 1902, he was exiled for 5 years.

This time, to Siberia. A life like that was bound to affect his health:

Felix was taken ill with tuberculosis.

In 1905, after escaping exile again, Dzerzhinsky returns to Warsaw,

into the very thick of it. He kept doing revolutionary work:

organizing strikes and protests for Polish workers,

heading the Warsaw Party Conference.

In Warsaw, he was arrested again, but amnestied in just 3 months.

Before his next incarceration, Felix managed to meet Vladimir Lenin.

Their meeting took place in Stockholm,

at the 4th Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party.

At the same time, Dzerzhinsky met his true love.

Warsaw, Polish Kingdom, Russian Empire, 1906

Her name was Sofia Muszkat. The future wife of Felix Dzerzhinsky

was born in a rich Jewish family. She received brilliant education,

graduated from the Warsaw Conservatory specializing in piano,

but when she joined the ranks of the Russian Social Democratic

Labor Party, she started living the life her beloved

had already gotten used to: arrests, prisons, exiles, escapes...

In early 1908, for illegal activity and escaping prison,

Felix Dzerzhinsky is arrested again and exiled to Siberia permanently.

The revolutionary's health kept getting worse,

his tuberculosis progressed. But even that fact didn't keep him

from escaping yet again. In 1910 Felix Dzerzhinsky and

Sofia Muszkat got married, and in a few months Sofia,

who was expecting a child, was sent to Warsaw by the party

to do illegal work, where she was arrested.

Dzerzhinsky's first and only son Jan was born in 1911,

in the Serbia prison for women. Then Sofia was sentenced again

to exile to Eastern Siberia permanently, but soon after

she ran away to abroad with her son using forged papers.

In emigration she found out Dzerzhinsky was arrested again.

He would only see his son for the first time in 8 years.

Oryol Governate prison, Oryol, Russian Empire. 1914

In September 1912, after illegally returning to Warsaw,

Felix Dzerzhinsky was arrested, and in April 1914,

he was sentenced to three years of penal servitude.

He served his sentence at the Oryol prison,

which was infamous for particularly cruel conditions

which would lead to illnesses en masse and high mortality

and suicide rates among the convicts.

Dzerzhinsky states this in a letter:

“What you have found out about our living conditions is all true.

“They are simply unbearable. Owing to them, every day someone

“gets brought out of here… in a casket. Out of our category,

“political prisoners, 5 people have died over the last 6 weeks,

“all of them from consumption.”

These years were the darkest period of Dzerzhinsky's life.

Almost all the time he was wearing shackles, in solitary cells or

in barracks overcrowded with people dying of typhus and tuberculosis.

Scars from shackles on his ankles would stay with him his whole life.

In 1916 Felix was sentenced to 6 more years of penal labor

which he served in the Butyrskaya Prison in Moscow.

All in all, Dzerzhinsky spent 11 years in penal colonies,

prisons and exile, and it was exactly this fact

that forged Felix's character, which is why he was

rightfully nicknamed Iron Felix.

When after the February revolution of 1917 the workers

came to free Dzerzhinsky, the one who walked out of that prison

was the same resilient man they knew and were ready to follow.

By that time the Russian Empire had already gotten involved in WWI.

There were anti-war protests all over it, strikes, and bread riots.

Dzerzhinsky now handled propaganda in army regiments.

He changed his prisoner uniform to a soldier's blouse and trenchcoat:

that outfit seemed comfortable to him and it became part of his image.

In August, Felix Dzerzhinsky decided for good: he would follow Lenin.

In Petrograd, at the sami-legal 6th Congress of the Bolshevist Party,

he was elected to the Central Committee. Dzerzhinsky becomes

an important figure of the Bolshevist military wing.

Central Executive Committee is the highest governing body of the Party

in between the Congresses. The Central Executive Committee

governed over all Party activities and local Party bodies,

it handled staff policy. The Committee guided the work of

key governmental and social organizations,

created various political bodies, departments and enterprises,

appointed editorial staffs of key newspapers and journals,

allocated budget funds. Over the course of various periods

of its existence in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union

the Communist Party had several names:

1898-1917: Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, RSDRP

1917-1918: Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (Bolshevist)

1918-1925: Russian Communist Party (Bolshevist), RKP (b)

1925-1952: All-Soviet Communist Party (Bolshevist), VKP (b)

1952-1991: Communist Party of the Soviet Union, KPSS

The Bolshevist uprising started in Petrograd in the night

of October 24, 1917. Felix Dzerzhinsky was tasked with

coordinating the captures of bridges, the telegraph, the power station

and other critically important objects.

Soon, the news of a new government spread to every Russian city

via telegraph. Meanwhile, the country was plunging into chaos.

From Dzerzhinsky's memoirs:

“It was a time when we took position in every possible ministry

“to find nothing but empty boxes and locked cabinets without keys.

“None of the functionaries of the key offices were willing

“to recognize Soviet power. Our departments were swamped with

“opportunists who wanted to line their pockets

“and fix their shady deals. And at the same time,

“in Petrograd and other cities, counterrevolutionary organizations

“were being created.”

Mobs would raid wine warehouses and stores.

On the night of December 4, in Petrograd alone there were recorded

69 pogroms and 611 various criminal offenses.

There was a lack of fuel, the transport system

was almost completely idle…

Petrograd, RSFSR, 1917

To handle the situation in the country, it was decided to create

an organization to fight internal counterrevolution,

sabotage and black markets. It was named

the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, and Felix Dzerzhinsky

was appointed its chairman, having already proved himself to be

a good leader.

On December 10, 1917, the Izvestia newspaper announced the creation

of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, stating its address,

Petrograd, 2 Gorokhovaya St., and visiting hours.

The chairman of the Commission received just 30 men at his disposal,

selected among the trusted Bolsheviks. They had no knowledge or skills

in investigating, but they did have experience with underground work.

In those days, the Commission's main task was fighting crime,

including preventive actions. It was authorized to confiscate property,

evict people out of their houses and apartments,

depriving them of food stamps.

Death by firing squad was not used by the Commission at the time,

since at first, the Bolsheviks banned capital punishment in Russia.

WWI was still going on, and German forces were

getting close to Petrograd. Anti-Bolshevik groups were working

behind the Russian Army lines.

On January 1, 1918, an attempt on Vladimir Lenin's life took place.

With the situation that had formed, the Soviet government decided to

transfer the capital to the safer city of Moscow, and issued an edict

called “Socialist Motherland in danger!”

It was this edict that reinstated capital punishment in the country.

It is usually agreed upon that it happened at the suggestion of

Dzerzhinsky himself, who asserted that

“the right to execute is extremely important for the Commission”,

even if “its sword may accidentally fall upon innocent heads.”

The first sentence to execution by firing squad was passed

by the Commission on February 24, 1918.

The persons convicted by it were a robber calling himself Prince Eboli

and his associate Britty.

They would rob apartments and government institutions,

and they had stolen a considerable amount of jewelry

from the Winter Palace. From February to June of 1918,

50 people were shot at the behest of the Extraordinary Commission.

Meanwhile, the political situation became incredibly tense

as a result of a terrorist attack with Dzerzhinsky at its center.

The Bolsheviks were getting ready to sign a separate peace treaty

with Germany and take Russia out of the war.

The Socialist Revolutionary Party opposed it vehemently.

The SRs who had become Lenin's allies after the revolution

decided to mount an uprising in the summer of 1918.

The Socialist Revolutionary Party is a revolutionary political party

of the Russian Empire, later the Russian Republic and RSFSR.

Shortly after the February revolution of 1917, the SRs turned into

a massive political power, its numbers reaching a million members.

Its representatives held several key positions in the government.

The population found its ideas of democratic socialism and

a peaceful transition to it attractive.

But despite all this, the SRs didn't manage to hold onto their power.

To sabotage the peace treaty with Germany, the SRs organized the

assassination of the German ambassador in Moscow Wilhelm von Mirbach.

The main actor of the assassination, an 18 year old SR Yakov Blumkin

who served under Dzerzhinsky in the Extraordinary Commission.

Moscow, RSFSR. June 6, 1918

To set up the assassination, Blumkin used papers

with forged Dzerzhinsky's signature. The one who forged it was

the First Deputy to the Chairman of the Commission,

Vyacheslav Aleksandrovich. Aleksandrovich and Blumkin

came into Dzerzhinsky's office together, took the stamp from the safe,

and stamped the papers. The conspirators discussed the details and

were already getting ready to leave when Aleksandrovich

accidentally looked behind the privacy screen in the corner.

It is hard to imagine what he felt when he saw

Dzerzhinsky sleeping behind it. Iron Felix,

being remarkably hard-working, had had a rest right at his workplace.

As it happened, he literally slept through the terrorist attack

that complicated the political situation and almost proved fatal

for Dzerzhinsky himself.

On July 6, 1918, Blumkin and his assistant Andreev arrived

to the German embassy on Denezhny Alley in Moscow.

After showing their false papers they came in to see Mirbach.

When already talking to the ambassador, Blumkin took out

his revolver and opened fire. He shot almost all the rounds,

but he was so nervous he didn't his target once.

Mirbach ran to the adjoining room. Andreev threw a bomb

at the ambassador's feet, but it didn't explode. Then Andreev

punched Mirbach and he fell down. Blumkin grabbed the bomb

and threw it at the ambassador again. An explosion sounded...

Having left their hats, the revolver, the papers and a briefcase with

an extra bomb on the table, the terrorists escaped through a window

and hid inside the Morozov mansion on Trekhsvyatitelsky Alley.

This is where the most numerous Extraordinary Commission squad was,

under the command of Popov, an SR. Dzerzhinsky arrived to arrested

Blumkin and Andreev, but he was disarmed and arrested

by his own subordinates.

Arrests of other Bolsheviks started as well.

The SR uprising was barely suppressed, and Dzerzhinsky himself

was dismissed from his position as the Commission chairman

until judgment was passed. The investigators were trying to find out

whether he took part in the plot himself, since he had a motive.

Just like the SRs, Dzerzhinsky had spoken out against

signing the peace treaty, since according to its conditions,

Russia would lose the Polish lands that were his homeland…

Felix said again and again that he didn't know anything about

the upcoming plot against Mirbach, and his signature had been forged.

They believed him, and reinstated him in his job.

From March 1919 to July 1923, he simultaneously became

Minister of the Interior and chairman of the

Military Council of the Extra-Departmental Police Forces.

Apart from that, Dzerzhinsky headed the Extraordinary Commission.

He would go to sleep at 3 to 4 AM, and he would be at his desk at 9.

On February 20, Dzerzhinsky was also appointed chairman of

the People's Commissariat for Labor. His health,

damaged in prisons and penal colonies, was getting worse:

tuberculosis, heart problems… But there was no time to rest,

there was still a Civil War in the country.

The population had split up into two rival movements:

the Reds and the Whites. The situation was worsened by intervention

from foreign powers.

In the summer of 1918, English troops landed in Arkhangelsk and Baku.

Vladivostok was occupied by Japanese and French regiments.

On Soviet heartland, foreign intelligence operatives became active.

One of them was Sidney Reilly.

Sidney Reilly was a British spy. His call sign was 007, and he was

one of the prototypes of James Bond. He was fluent in 6 languages,

including Russian. He worked in Russia starting from late 1917.

Among other things, Reilly had free passage into the Kremlin

granted by legitimate Extraordinary Commission papers

issued to a Sidney Relinsky.

On August 28, 1918, a grand operation was supposed

to take place headed by Sidney Reilly.

The location was the Bolshoi Theater where a Central Committee

session would take place. With 2 million rubles, Reilly bribed

the head of the Kremlin guard detail, Latvian Riflemen Commander

Eduard Berzin. On the day in question, he was supposed to

have everybody loyal to him help him shoot every

Committee member present including Lenin.

The same night, 60,000 Tzarist officers were supposed to rise up.

Reilly handed Berzin another 1,200,000 rubles for the expenses.

He never as much as suspected that Berzin was Dzerzhinsky's agent.

Sidney Reilly's operation failed. He escaped abroad

but was sentenced to execution in absence. The sentence was only

carried out 7 years later, when Dzerzhinsky's people managed to

lure Reilly to Moscow once again.

The plot was liquidated on time, but yet another attempt

on Lenin's life happened anyway. On August 30, 1918, Fanny Kaplan

wounded him in the courtyard of the Michelson Factory.

The same day in Petrograd, an SR named Leonid Kannegiser killed

the chairman of the Petrograd Extraordinary Commission Moisei Uritsky.

Anti-Bolshevik riots became more frequent, often accompanied

by murder and armed conflict. Bolsheviks announced that

the Soviet Republic was a military camp. So-called Red Terror began.

Red Terror was a complex of punitive measures carried out

by the Bolsheviks during the Civil War against its class enemies:

nobles, landlords, officers, priests, kulaks, cossacks,

and also all counterrevolutionaries. Red Terror was a reaction

to White Terror, the extreme form of the repressive policies

of Anti-Bolshevik forces.

Moscow, 1918. Dzerzhinsky's letter to his wife:

“I was brought to the front lines, and my will

“is to fight and look with my eyes wide open upon the danger

“of this severe situation, and to be ruthless myself...

“Physically, I am tired, but I hold on with my guts.

“I almost don't leave my office, I work here,

“and here, in the corner, behind the screen, is my bed.

“I have been in Moscow for several months.

“My address is 11 Lubyanka.”

In 1918, the Commission became the main force of Red Terror.

At the end of 1917 it counted only 30 employees,

and now, 30,000 people served there.

There were 40 Governorate and 365 County Commissions.

In the areas where martial law was declared, the Chekists

were authorized to arrest people indefinitely without

proving their guilt, and to shoot the enemies of the Revolution

on the spot without passing the case to court.

The Commission functionaries took former landlords,

merchants, bankers, Tzarist Army officers and relatives

of White Guard members hostage.

For this purpose, small concentration camps were created.

And yet, Dzerzhinsky spoke out against torture and senseless

destruction of the enemy whether real or imagined.

There were cases when on his orders,

after beating a suspect, a Commission employee

would be fired, imprisoned, and in case of aggravating circumstances,

shot to death. But it was precisely Dzerzhinsky who was called

the Red Butcher. Iron Felix wasn't bothered by it since it was

the foreign press that wrote that. It even benefitted the Revolution

since now people trembled in fear of its punishing sword.

Dzerzhinsky wrote to his sister Aldona:

“For many, there is no name scarier than mine.”

At the height of Red Terror, following persistent advice

from Yakov Sverdlov and Vladimir Lenin, Dzerzhinsky

went to meet his family. 8 years had passed since he was

separated from his wife. He never got to see his son.

It was an uneasy time for a vacation, but in October

the Red Army was already attacking, many plots had been uncovered.

Dzerzhinsky shaved off his beard and moustache, shaved his head,

dressed like he was foreign and got into the train

with papers issued to a Felix Domansky.

His family was living in emigration in Switzerland.

It was only from the rare letters from his wife that he knew

how Jan was growing up. But seeing him, embracing him,

meeting him was something Dzerzhinsky only managed to do now.

This trip to Switzerland in the middle of the Civil War

still causes much discussion among historians.

He probably had some other assignment from Lenin,

because it's hard to imagine he would be let out abroad

during such harsh times just to meet his family.

But as to what that assignment was, it's still a mystery.

Bern, Switzerland, 1919.

It was only in the spring of 1919 that Sofia and her son

moved to Moscow. The Dzerzhinskys moved to a 2-bedroom

apartment in the Kremlin. Jan went to school, and Sofia

started Party work, having received a job at the

People's Commissariat of Education. Dzerzhinsky

would still see his family rarely: having several jobs, he worked

to exhaustion, and he was constantly on the road: he'd get sent to

Minsk, Bialystok, Wilno, Kharkov. He would need to restore

the coal industry, organize foodstuffs supplies.

June 13, 1920. From a letter from Dzerzhinsky to his wife:

“And I am unhappy with myself. I can see and feel that I could

“give more than what I am giving. I could... Perhaps I am too

“mentally exhausted, I can't concentrate and get a grip

“to make myself spare my energy more, so it could possibly

“yield more with the least fatigue.”

Dzerzhinsky continued his work at the Commission.

After traveling the country, he realized that Red Terror that was

originally aimed at fighting the enemy began killing simple folk too.

In 1920, in the Tambov Governorate, a rebel regiment was liquidated,

where out of 11,000 dead most were simple peasants. In 1921,

after the Kronstadt uprising, over 2,000 people were shot.

Dzerzhinsky could never come to terms with that.

Out of a Dzerzhinsky speech at the 10th Congress of RKP(b):

“Comrades, you name me candidate to the Central Committee,

“possibly with a view that I go on working as Commission Chairman.

“But I do not want, and most importantly, cannot work there anymore.

“You know my hand has never shaken as I aimed the punishing sword

“at the heads of our class enemies. You know, my comrades,

“that I spared no effort in the revolutionary struggle, in fighting

“for better lives for workers and peasants. And now I have to repress

“them, too. But I cannot, hear me, I cannot! I ask you to withdraw

“my candidacy.”

Dzerzhinsky's request was denied. Someone had to do that job,

and it was precisely the revoutionary fanatic Iron Felix who had

the qualities of a born Chekist: a cold head and a hot heart.

Betwen 1921 and 1929, the Commission arrested 1,004,956 people,

only 20% of them were convicted. Dzerzhinsky still tried not to be

a butcher in his work. Head of the Commission was worried

about the Chekists' health. Dzerzhinsky realized how important

sports were, for Commission men as well.

So on a personal initiative from Felix Dzerzhinsky, in 1923,

the famous sports club Dinamo was founded specifically for

the Internal Affairs workers.

Moscow, RSFSR, 1920.

Apart from that Dzerzhinsky occupied himself with the street children.

After WWI and the Civil War, there were about 5,000,000 in the country.

Memoirs of Sergei Tikhomolov, Dzerzhinsky's personal driver:

“Once we were driving down Myasnitskaya St. which was being asphalted.

“It was boiled in the streets in special cauldrons, and at night,

“street children would sleep in them. Dzerzhinsky asked me

“to stop the car next to one of them. ...he walked up to the bowl

“and took the kids out of there. Some of them got scared and ran.

“Dzerzhinsky stroke up a conversation with the rest

“and took them into our car. We went to the Commission building

“on Lubyanka. ...he walked the kids into his office,

“fed them and talked them into going to live at an orphanage.”

In January, 1921, Dzerzhinsky proposed to the

People's Commissary of Education Anatoly Lunacharsky

to create a Committee for Bettering Children's Lives.

It soon started work, and every Chekist would donate 10%

of his monthly paycheck towards maintanance of the orphanages.

By 1924, the country already had over 280 orphanages,

420 labor communes, and 880 playgrounds.

Over 90,000 teenagers were educated in 927 factory schools.

The famous FED photo camera (a copy of the German Leica II)

was manufactured by the Kharkov Labor Commune. The idea of

creating such communes came to the famous pedagogue Anton Makarenko,

and Dzerzhinsky actively assisted its realization.

The abbreviation FED itself stands for Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky.

Dzerzhinsky received many letters from commuyne members

and foster children in 1925 and 1926. There were some framed photos

at his work desk next to a picture of his son Jan.

In just 7 years the number of street children in the USSR went down

from 5 million to 200,000. Working with children seemed like

the best way to prevent counterrevolution and terror to Dzerzhinsky.

April 25, 1920, First Marshal of Poland Juzef Pilsudsky

starts his Kiev offensive. Poland was supported by Western powers,

and Pilsudsky seriously hoped to restore

the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in its historical borders.

He managed to get together an army of 700,000 soldiers.

Felix Dzerzhinsky would always emphasize that he was a Bolshevik first

and not a Pole, but the fate of his homeland bothered him.

He saw the future of Poland as being part of the USSR.

At the end of July Dzerzhinsky went to Wilno, and then to Bialystok,

a big industrial city in Northern Poland which had already been taken

by the Red Army. Here, the prototype for a future government of

Socialist Poland was created: the Polish Revolutionary Committee.

They eagerly took to composing manifestos to address Poles with.

Dzerzhinsky was being exceptionally active.

In the first two weeks of August, he spoke at rallies,

organized the supply of foodstuffs and industrial goods,

demanded the Central Committee send Communist Poles...

And it was all in vain. The Polish people didn't accept the government

created by Soviet Russia.

Pilsudsky's Army gradually pushed the Red Army out of all

Polish cities, and in March, 1921, the Communists were forced to sign

an unfavorable peace treaty that ceded large parts of Ukraine

and Belarus to Poland. That is how the fight between two

revolutionary movements ended in the Polish Kingdom.

Social Democrat Dzerzhinsky lost Poland to the nationalist Pilsudsky.

It became a personal tragedy for Iron Felix.

On April 14, 1921, Dzerzhinsky got a new appointment.

While functioning as Extraordinary Commission Chairman,

he became the People's Commissary for Railways.

Dzerzhinsky himself described the situation like this:

“Our railroads are one single big horror. Thievery in train cars,

“thievery in ticket offices, thievery in warehouses, thievery

“in work contracts, thievery in stockpiles.”

It was no surprise that the Central Committee decided that

head of the Extraordinary Commission was to become head of transport.

The railroads of the country were in terrible condition.

In the Civil War 2000 versts of railways, or 80% of the rail system.

4322 bridges were out of commission, 400 workshops and depots,

60% of the locomotives, 1/3 of the train cars.

On an assignment from Dzerzhinsky, a group of Chekists

came to see the Tzarist Railway Minister Ivan Borisov.

They weren't there to arrest him but to coax him.

They brought Borisov food, wood and, most importantly,

proposed that he get back to work as assistant to

Commissar for Railways Felix Dzerzhinsky.

And the next day, Borisov started the inventory of the railway.

Dzerzhinsky had one more problem to solve: railroad crime.

Entire special trains got stolen from freight stations

with forged waybills. The Commission began its investigation.

Soon, secret workshops manufacturing fake stamps were

uncovered in Moscow. Among the confiscated evidence,

a brand new stamp with Dzerzhinsky's own signature was found.

At the end of 1921, Lenin decided that it was time to get rid of

the Extraordinary Commission. The country needed foreign investment,

and Westerners were afraid to invest into a country that had

such a fearsome organization. That's why instead of it,

in February 1922 State Political Directorate, or GPU, was created.

It was headed by Felix Dzerzhinsky.

The structure of the new department was borrowed from the Commission.

The main objective of the new service weren't mass shootings

or actions behind White Army lines, it was meticulous and inconspicous

work with the opposition inside the country, intelligence work

among the anti-Soviet emigres and in foreign states.

Unlike the Commission, GPU didn't have unlimited authority.

According to the law, it was to become a

preliminary investigative agency under the prosecutor.

People still called GPU workers Chekists. The word GPUshnik

never became popular. On September 2, 1922,

the Anti-Corruption Committee was formed.

Eloiminating corruption was Felix Dzerzhinsky's job as well.

In 1922, the number of bribery convictions reached 3254

in 49 governorates alone, which was twice the number of those

convicted for crimes against the state.

Bribery meant capital punishment.

Meanwhile, the country was being overtaken by famine.

34 governorates were hit with drought. There wasn't enough bread

to feed the hungry or enough seeds to sow the fields.

Considerable foodstuff reserves were held in Siberia:

23 million pounds of bread and a million and a half pounds of meat.

To send that mountain of food to the hungry central regions,

it was necessary to send 228 train cars every day.

But the railway lacked fuel and workforce.

Dzerzhinsky left for Siberia. He spent over 50 days there.

The railway workers who hadn't been paid in 3 months got their pay.

A system of bonuses was introduced for train engineers

for saving coal and working without accident. By March 1922, trains

carrying food would go in one direction: East to West. Day and night.

On January 21, 1924, Lenin died. Dzerzhinsky was entrusted

with organizing his funeral. According to one version, it was head of

now-GPU who came up with embalming the leader and

constructing the Mausoleum. And inside the Party, power struggles began.

Dzerzhinsky asked to be let go from the position of Railway Commissary

to become head of the Supreme Soviet of the National Economy.

In essence, he headed the entire economy of the USSR.

As an economist, Dzerzhinsky turned out to be very pragmatic.

He stood for the wellbeing of the peasants.

Apart from that, he was a proponent of developing

small scale private trade which would allow to lower the prices

of food and household goods. It was Dzerzhinsky who was the first

to occupy himself with the question of developing

the metallurgial complex of the country and industrializing

the entirety of the Soviet economy.

By 1924, the USSR had overcome an agricultural, fuel

and transport crises. Gross output of major industries doubled.

A monetary reform took place. The ruble became a free currency

and it cost about 6 USD at the international market.

Soviet economy managed to achieve such results thanks to the

New Economic Policy, or NEP, which Dzerzhinsky spent

a lot of effort on introducing. However, iron and steel smelting

were 7% and 17% their pre-Revolutionary level.

A severe shortage of metal products could be felt in the country.

Even though throughout 1924 and 1925 the industry gross product

rose 62% compared to the preceding year, villagers were still

too poor to buy anything from the city. There was a sales crisis

of industrial goods. Factories had no money to develop.

Meanwhile Dzerzhinsky started having health problems more often.

The years he'd spent in prison and the colonies showed.

On March 5, 1925, the Politburo discussed the question of

Dzerzhinsky's health. The decision was to get

together a medical committee. According to its recommendations,

Dzerzhinsky was only allowed to work over 6 hours a day

if there was any urgent state business. He was forbidden from speaking

at Party meetings. He was prescribed two days' rest, outside Moscow

if possible. In late 1925, Dzerzhinsky had a major heart attack.

His doctor Ioann Baumholtz advised him to cut his workday to 4 hours.

Dzerzhinsky adamantly rejected the doctor's demands

despite being tortured by wheezing and coughing.

Before speaking at the July Plenary Assembly of the Committee in 1926,

Dzerzhinsky had worked all night on his speech about the terrible

state of the country's economy. The clerks noted his depression

and sickly look. But after lunch, he still left for the Assembly.

Memoirs of Bohumir Smeral, the founder of the

Czechoslovak Communist Party:

“I was sitting across from him when he was speaking at the stand.

“He would often press his left hand to his heart. Then he started

“pressing both of his hands against his heart and you could

“mistake it for a rhetorical gesture. But now we now that

“he gave his last big speech despite great physical suffering.”

After the speech, Dzerzhinsky felt bad. Others helped him

get out of the hall and lay him down on a sofa. Dr Wulman

who was called gave him a camphor shot and some

lily-of-the-valley drops. They never had the time

to help him with anything else.

Abram Belenky, Special Department Head of OGPU Collegium,

described Iron Felix's last minutes like this:

“When the first fit of weakness had passed, he got up and

“walked down the hall, wavering. When asked to give his briefcase,

“he said, 'I can carry it myself.' When he'd gotten to his apartment,

“he walked up to his bed and, refusing help again,

“said incredibly quietly: 'I can...' And he fell down instantly.”

He wasn't even 50 at the time of his death. He died on July 20, 1926,

aged 48. His cause of death was cardioplegia.

His ideas, his ideals, and his cause were what he stayed

fanatically loyal to until the very end.

From Dzerzhinsky's letters:

“...man, like all living things, is in constant motion,

“something dies in him all the time and is born again,

“his every moment is a new life, revealing latent energy,

“abilities: life is in flux, and that is its beauty.”