Posted on 11/09/2005 10:31:27 AM PST by REactor
His most famous statue remains in the purgatory of Soviet monuments, but a less conspicuous sculpture of Soviet secret police founder Felix Dzerzhinsky has returned to its original home more than a decade after it was hastily removed amid fears of popular discontent.
Moscow's police force has restored a bust of the once-feared "Iron Felix" in the courtyard of its headquarters at Petrovka 38, where the bust had been removed by police officers on Aug. 22, 1991, due to fears that the angry mob that had brought down Dzerzhinsky's 16-ton statue on Lubyanskaya Ploshchad would attempt a repeat performance.
City police chief Vladimir Pronin approved the request of a group of retired police officers to return the bust during a meeting with them Friday, former city police chief Arkady Murashov said.
"Apparently, Pronin decided to give them a gift for Police Day," Murashov said by telephone, referring to the annual Nov. 10 holiday.
City police spokeswoman Olga Chugunova confirmed that the Dzerzhinsky bust had been returned to the courtyard but declined to comment further. She said photographers were not being allowed to take pictures.
Liberal politicians expressed worries that the return of the bust was a sign of a creeping return to the Soviet system.
"The fact that the bust of Felix Dzerzhinsky was returned to its old location is proof that representatives of the current powers that be ... are trying to return to the old totalitarian system," said Nikita Belykh, head of the Union of Right Forces party, Interfax reported.
Vladimir Ryzhkov, an independent State Duma deputy, urged human rights and pro-democracy organizations to appeal to Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev to remove the bust, saying Dzerzhinsky represented the Soviet secret police, concentration camps and "bloody atrocities," Interfax reported.
"We cannot and must not allow everything that this [bust] represents to return to our lives," he said.
Pronin on Tuesday praised the artistic merits of the bust by sculptor Anatoly Bichukov, noting that it had "repeatedly been entered in different art competitions."
"I greet this initiative positively, inasmuch that the opinion of veterans must be respected," Pronin said, Interfax reported.
The statue of Dzerzhinsky in front of the former KGB headquarters on Lubyanskaya Ploshchad was one of the more notorious icons of the Soviet past. It was toppled from its pedestal near the former headquarters of the KGB by protesters after the failed coup by Communist hard-liners in August 1991 and has found a home alongside other Soviet-era monuments outside the Central House of Artists.
A long-simmering drive to resurrect the statue was shot down in January 2003 by the Moscow City Duma's monuments committee despite support from Mayor Yury Luzhkov for the move, which was initiated by Communist Party members in Irkutsk.
Murashov said police officers quickly removed the bust at Petrovka 38 after its more famous counterpart was brought down.
"They were scared that protesters would storm the building," said Murashov, who headed the city police force in 1991-92 and is a member of the Union of Right Forces.
He was not sure where it had been stored all these years, but said that it had been "probably in a warehouse somewhere."
Murashov said he would probably not have approved the restoration of the bust were he still the city's police chief because "Dzerzhinsky is not the type of person who should be revered."
"But if a group of veterans approached me, maybe I would consider it."
Will make great roost for pigeons so the old commies can feed them..........
This is like retired German police officers requesting a bust of Himmler in their headquarters.
So they can sit around and talk about "The Good Old Days"......?
"The debate over Dzerzhinsky's monument is part of an on-going rehabilitation of Soviet history. Postage stamps have been issued commemorating heroes of Russian espionage, according to the British Broadcasting Corporation, while the highly respected Italian news daily Corrier della Sera reports that Russian intelligence personnel are using a special calendar which lists former Soviet holidays."
Murashov said he would probably not have approved the restoration of the bust were he still the city's police chief because "Dzerzhinsky is not the type of person who should be revered."
Murashov has a gift for understatement. The Polish "Iron Felix" had a lot in common with the Inquisition's Torquemada, but with far less mercy.
The men Dzerzhinsky wanted for the Checka were to be "determined comrades - solid, hard men without pity - who are ready to sacrifice everything for the sake of the revolution."
"Just round up all the most resolute people you can, who understand that there is nothing more effective than a bullet in the head to shut people up. Experience has shown that you only need a small number of people like that the turn a whole situation around," declared Dzerzhinsky.
Dzerzhinsky was, however, more than a simple murderer. He was also a clever counterintelligence director who learned from his Tsarist predecessors, and developed the art of deception far beyond anything previously known. "
ping
Maybe they will put a bust of Putin next to it.
Ping to my good friend GarySpFc!
Here he is, with the boss's daughter.
The flapper with the pistol - bizarre!
All I will say is no shit Sherlock. Of course not meant for you TJ.
Wow! They're catching on quick.
In another 5 years or so the statue will disappear. Lenin will disappear sometime in the not too distant future too.
"This is like retired German police officers requesting a bust of Himmler in their headquarters."
Exactly. Fortunately, the Nazi regime was utterly destroyed.
The Soviet regime was not. Golitsyn provides much insight. Much of "peristroika" was a fake.
From an article in the Wall Street Journal, page 1, Wednesday, February 23, 2005:
"Mr. Putin him self served more than 15 years in the KGB and later headed its successor, the FSB. Since taking over the Kremlin in 2000, he has presided over an unprecedented influx of ex-KGB men into the upper echelons of power---men whose formative years were spent learning how to undermine the West's interests.
Prominent among the ex-KGB officials who now pace the Kremlin's corridors are Defense minister Sergei Ivanov, Interior Minister Rahid Nurgaliev, and FSB chief Nikolai Patrushev, as well as the heads of Russia's arms-export, defense-procurement, and drug-enforcement agencies. A close Putin aide and former KGB man, Victor Ivano, serves on the board of flagship airline OAO Aeroflot. A favorite parlor game in Russia is to divine which other senior officials and businessmen have suspicious gaps in their resume that suggest a past with the intelligence services."
Thanks for the ping.
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