Putin praises Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the communist Cheka who inspired the Gestapo

Vladimir Putin is leading Russia down a path back to the darkest times of the Soviet communist dictatorship.

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Putin names FSB academy after the founder of the Cheka

On Wednesday, April 22, the Kremlin announced the signing of a decree by Putin via its official website. The decree, which changes the name of the FSB academy (the Russian successor to the Soviet KGB), contains the following text:

In recognition of the achievements of the staff of the Federal State Higher Education Institution "Academy of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation" in the professional training of personnel in the interest of the Federal Security Service, and taking into account the outstanding contribution of F.E. Dzerzhinsky to ensuring the security of the State, I hereby decree:

1. To confer the honorary title "in honor of F.E. Dzerzhinsky" upon the Federal State Higher Education Institution "Academy of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation named after F.E. Dzerzhinsky" and henceforth to refer to it as the Federal State Higher Education Institution "Academy of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation named after F.E. Dzerzhinsky."

2. This Decree shall enter into force on the date of its signature.

This decree refers to Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky (1877-1926), a Soviet communist of Polish origin. Born into a noble family in the part of Poland that came under Russian rule during the partitions, Dzerzhinsky was a loyal servant of the first communist dictator, Lenin, and the founder of the infamous Cheka (short for All-Russian Extraordinary Commission), a political police force established on December 20, 1917.

A mass murderer who was especially vicious towards priests and religious people

Ten years ago, I told you here about the extremely brutal torture methods of the Cheka, which was responsible for the murder of more than a million people between 1918 and 1922 for political reasons. The murders had all kinds of victims, including workers and peasants punished for going on strike.

As I explained in 2016, the Cheka was particularly vicious against Christian priests, monks, and nuns, subjecting them to torture and murder with methods worthy of true sadists. Thousands of Russian priests fell victim to this bloodthirsty political police in what became known as the Red Terror, a savage wave of repression that had Dzerzhinsky as one of its main instigators. Dzerzhinsky also promoted the first concentration camps of what would later become the Gulag, the vast network of political prisoner camps of the Soviet dictatorship.

The brutal methods of the Cheka served as inspiration for the nazi Gestapo

In July 2020 I already pointed out here that the repressive methods and inventions created by the Cheka served as inspiration for the nazi Gestapo. In "Dismantling Tyranny: Transitioning Beyond Totalitarian Regimes" (2005), Ilan Berman and J. Michael Waller noted: "The Nazis likewise studied, copied, and perfected the Cheka's mass killing inventions, including the gas van into which people were herded and killed by carbon monoxide and the death camp, so they might exterminate populations more efficiently."

In "Gestapo: Instrument of Tyranny" (1956), British historian Edward Crankshaw noted: "For the purposes of general supervision and repression the Gestapo modeled itself closely on the Soviet secret police. Himmler has at its command an extremely able police officer, Heinrich Mueller ... a close and devoted student of Soviet metods. Mueller was impressed by the efficiency of the internal spy system which had been perfected by the Soviet government, the effect of which, ideally, was to isolate the individual by making it impossible for anybody to trust anybody else."

In 1991, the statue of Dzerzhinsky in Moscow was torn down; in 2023, Putin installed another one

In December 1958, the Soviet dictatorship erected a statue in honor of Dzerzhinsky in Lubyanka Square, next to the site of the former Cheka headquarters, which later became the NKVD (during Stalin's era) and the KGB (between 1954 and 1991). On August 22, 1991, an angry mob toppled the statue after the failed communist coup that attempted to halt Gorbachev's liberalization policies. It was one of the first communist monuments to fall in Russia, indicating the hatred many Russians felt for this sadistic criminal.

In 2023, Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) installed a statue of Dzerzhinsky in front of its headquarters in Yasenevo, south of Moscow. The statue installed then is a smaller version of the one toppled in 1991. That monument and the decree signed yesterday by Putin send a very clear message: Russia is returning to the dark days of the USSR. Something Ukrainians were already very clear about since 2022, when the Russian invaders began installing statues of Lenin and raising communist flags in the occupied territories from Ukraine. I wonder, once again, how there can be people who call themselves Christian or conservative supporting a regime like that.