Students campaign for removal of campus monument to ‘father’ of Soviet KGB
Students have petitioned the president of Russia’s Higher School of Economics for the removal of a monument to Felix Dzerzhinsky, head of the first Soviet security police who oversaw mass persecution after the 1917 revolution.
In a letter from students, Dzerzhinsky is described as “a founder of the Soviet system of state terror.” It refers to his monument on the school campus as a “justification of terrorism” that “casts a slur on the school’s reputation.”
Dzerzhinsky led the Cheka (All-Russian Emergency Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage) security police after the 1917 October Revolution until 1922 – a period referred to by historians as the Red Terror. It was marked by mass repression and the killing of any perceived counterrevolutionary elements, which resulted in tens of thousands of deaths.
Also on rt.com Communists ask Putin to bring back monument to KGB founder DzerzhinskyDzerzhinsky remains a highly controversial figure in Russian history as he is widely considered an architect of the Red Terror. The policy was based – in his own words – on “intimidation, arrest, and destruction of the revolution’s enemies on the basis of class affiliation and pre-revolutionary roles.”
However, in response to the petition, the school’s president Yaroslav Kuzminov pointed out that monuments were “history symbols… not objects of worship,” adding that it was the Bolsheviks who started the tradition of removing monuments.
“We should remember history, not shut ourselves from it, hiding or scratching out some pages,” he said.
The most famous monument to Dzerzhinsky, nicknamed ‘Iron Felix,’ was once located near the KGB headquarters in Lubyanka Square in the center of Moscow. After being dismantled following the August coup in 1991, it was moved to the Muzeon Park of Arts – an open-air sculpture museum.
Students involved in the campaign have suggested that the school’s statue of Dzerzhinsky could also be relocated to the Muzeon Park.
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