Feliks Dzierżyński, a middle-aged Pole, pallid from years in prison, created a punitive, deterrent and intelligence organization, the Cheka. Dzierżyński became the role model for all future Soviet secret police chiefs, just asLenin set the example for leaders of the Soviet party and state. It was the symbiosis of Dzierżyński and Stalin which would determine the fate of the USSR after Lenin fell ill and died.
Dzierżyński, who put himself forward for the post despite being as unlikely a leader as Stalin, was the ideal chief for a repressive organization. Like Stalin, he was neither Russian nor an intellectual in the sense that Lenin and Trotsky considered themselves. He had unique experience: nobody had worked as hard in eleven years of prison and exile on unmasking traitors to the revolutionary movement – chairing a committee of prisoners that interrogated suspected provocateurs, as his widow proudly recorded. Nobody was as flamboyantly self-sacrificing for the cause as Dzierżyński: his sense of propriety and duty were hypertrophied. From 1918 on, in his Lubianka office Dzierżyński interrogated prisoners and rummaged through their files and drove out to make arrests – like Stalin taking advantage of the lowest point in his victims’ biorhythms; Dzierżyński liked working late at night. The only task he, like Stalin, left to his underlings was executions. Only once did Dzierżyński shoot anybody dead – a drunken sailor who was swearing at him – and this induced a convulsive fit. In power even more ascetic than Stalin, Dzierżyński subsisted as he had in prison, on mint tea and bread, in an unheated office, his greatcoat for a blanket. He rolled cigarettes from rough Russian tobacco. Unlike Stalin, Dzierżyński was a pedantic purist. He threw away pancakes cooked by his sister because she had bought flour from a private trader; he dismissed his niece, and the man who had given her a job, from service on the railways because she had profited from the family name. Dzierżyński fled in indignation on the only occasion he went to an art gallery, never attended a concert and read only Polish romantic poetry or Marxist exegeses. Dzierżyński had his son fostered in a working-class family, where ‘it is easiest to preserve and enrich one’s soul’. Dzierżyński’s aesthetic sense was sublimated in work. His successor Menzhinsky wrote in his obituary: ‘Were it not for his artistic nature, his love of art and nature… for all his experience underground, he would never have reached the perfection of Chekist art in taking his opponents apart, which made him stand head and shoulders above all his colleagues.’
Dzierżyński gave the Cheka and its subsequent acronymic transformations a pseudo-chivalrous image of ‘sword and flame of the revolution’,and the conviction that they should be the central, sometimes supreme, power. The principles – ‘every communist must be a chekist’ – and the extrajudicial powers of the Cheka were established by Dzierżyńskis, although he always meant it to be subject to the party’s leader: to implement and enforce, not create, ideology and policy.
Without Dzierżyński’s authority and support, Stalin might never have come to power. In 1922 Dzierżyński would swing the half-million paramilitaries he controlled away from Trotsky’s principled ‘opposition’, to Stalin’s ‘loyal support’ for Lenin’s appeasement of those in the party who wanted civil peace, a partial restoration of capitalism and the rule of law. From 1917 to 1922, as Lenin’s faithful hound, he did more than Stalin for revolutionary unity but sided with Stalin when choices between fractions had to be made.
What brought together these two men of largely incompatible temperament, class and nationality? Dzierżyński and Stalin were drawn to each other, as other Georgian and Polish intellectuals and rebels always had been. For Georgians, Poland was a congenial part of the Russian empire for
Dzierżyński, who put himself forward for the post despite being as unlikely a leader as Stalin, was the ideal chief for a repressive organization. Like Stalin, he was neither Russian nor an intellectual in the sense that Lenin and Trotsky considered themselves. He had unique experience: nobody had worked as hard in eleven years of prison and exile on unmasking traitors to the revolutionary movement – chairing a committee of prisoners that interrogated suspected provocateurs, as his widow proudly recorded. Nobody was as flamboyantly self-sacrificing for the cause as Dzierżyński: his sense of propriety and duty were hypertrophied. From 1918 on, in his Lubianka office Dzierżyński interrogated prisoners and rummaged through their files and drove out to make arrests – like Stalin taking advantage of the lowest point in his victims’ biorhythms; Dzierżyński liked working late at night. The only task he, like Stalin, left to his underlings was executions. Only once did Dzierżyński shoot anybody dead – a drunken sailor who was swearing at him – and this induced a convulsive fit. In power even more ascetic than Stalin, Dzierżyński subsisted as he had in prison, on mint tea and bread, in an unheated office, his greatcoat for a blanket. He rolled cigarettes from rough Russian tobacco. Unlike Stalin, Dzierżyński was a pedantic purist. He threw away pancakes cooked by his sister because she had bought flour from a private trader; he dismissed his niece, and the man who had given her a job, from service on the railways because she had profited from the family name. Dzierżyński fled in indignation on the only occasion he went to an art gallery, never attended a concert and read only Polish romantic poetry or Marxist exegeses. Dzierżyński had his son fostered in a working-class family, where ‘it is easiest to preserve and enrich one’s soul’. Dzierżyński’s aesthetic sense was sublimated in work. His successor Menzhinsky wrote in his obituary: ‘Were it not for his artistic nature, his love of art and nature… for all his experience underground, he would never have reached the perfection of Chekist art in taking his opponents apart, which made him stand head and shoulders above all his colleagues.’
Dzierżyński gave the Cheka and its subsequent acronymic transformations a pseudo-chivalrous image of ‘sword and flame of the revolution’,and the conviction that they should be the central, sometimes supreme, power. The principles – ‘every communist must be a chekist’ – and the extrajudicial powers of the Cheka were established by Dzierżyńskis, although he always meant it to be subject to the party’s leader: to implement and enforce, not create, ideology and policy.
Without Dzierżyński’s authority and support, Stalin might never have come to power. In 1922 Dzierżyński would swing the half-million paramilitaries he controlled away from Trotsky’s principled ‘opposition’, to Stalin’s ‘loyal support’ for Lenin’s appeasement of those in the party who wanted civil peace, a partial restoration of capitalism and the rule of law. From 1917 to 1922, as Lenin’s faithful hound, he did more than Stalin for revolutionary unity but sided with Stalin when choices between fractions had to be made.
What brought together these two men of largely incompatible temperament, class and nationality? Dzierżyński and Stalin were drawn to each other, as other Georgian and Polish intellectuals and rebels always had been. For Georgians, Poland was a congenial part of the Russian empire for
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