Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky: biography

The Bolshevik Party was led by people of different backgrounds. Some of them were brilliant speakers, others were distinguished for their outstanding organizational abilities, while others were distinguished by their incredible brutality. A special place in party iconography is Dzerzhinsky Felix Edmundovich. Quotations from his speeches and simply phrases dropped by him in passing, indicate the ambiguity of nature and peculiar talent. On the one hand, they demonstrate the liveliness of the mind, a certain romanticism of the worldview and the soundness of reasoning, and on the other - enter into a direct contradiction with the methods of its work. Time, of course, was difficult, but it was made by people like that.

Conflicting icon

The portrait of Felix Dzerzhinsky during Soviet times adorned the walls of the offices of all organizations that inherited the functions of the Cheka (OGPU, MGB, KGB, MVD), and the monument stood in the center of the Lubyanka Square, directly opposite the building of the former joint-stock company Rossiya, which provided insurance services before the revolution. AO disappeared, and fear remained for a long time, all the time of the existence of the USSR. The apparatus of compulsion to the state is necessary, especially the people's and the proletarian. At the origins of the creation, at the very beginning of the development of the concept of its mechanism, stood Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky. The paradoxical nature of this situation (perhaps, the law) is that he himself spent a significant part of his life in exile and prison, suffering for his disagreement with the social system that dominated at that time. The experience gained by the "iron Felix" in those years was taken into account by him. The Soviet system of suppressing discontent turned out to be much stronger, tougher and more effective than the tsarist system.

The landlord's family and childhood spent in it

September 11, 1877 in the family of the gymnasium teacher EI Dzerzhinsky, Catholic faith, a son was born, named Felix. On the social status of the father of the future chairman of the Cheka could be attributed to the landlords, however, small, he owned only the village of Dzerzhinovo.

The family had many children, except Felix, brothers and sisters grew up in it (Ignaty, Kazimir, Stanislav, Yadviga, Aldona, Vladislav and Vanda), and it seems that the lack of money forced the poor gentry to work in the field of public education. When Felix was already a boy, a tragedy occurred on the farm, Edmund Iosifovich's daughter died from an accidental shot. Understand who was the culprit of Wanda's death, the investigators concluded that an accident had occurred due to negligence.

Yuzek Pilsudski, a gymnastic friend, and academic progress

At the age of ten, Felix became acquainted with another future great Pole, Uzek. The friends studied eight years together, not realizing that one of them would become a professional revolutionary and the other a convinced anti-communist. It is Józef Piłsudski who will be able to repel the attack of the Red forces in 1920, the rear of which will be commanded by Dzerzhinsky Felix Edmundovich. Nationality for a real Bolshevik is not so important, if necessary, then you can attack your native country.

The schoolgirl Felix did not show any special talents. In the first grade he studied for two years. The school can not be considered finished, he did not receive a certificate, only a certificate stating that he was given the "good" (but not "excellent") law of God, but in Latin, French, physics, geometry, algebra and history, his successes were evaluated On a solid "troika". And it was absolutely bad with Greek and Russian languages. And all this with satisfactory diligence, behavior and attention.

The beginning of the revolutionary struggle

So, the young man left the gymnasium walls. To all: to teachers and classmates, and to him it was clear that he does not shine with any special inclinations and talents. We did not have to expect a rich inheritance either. And then the young man was carried away by Marxism (then this idea actively seized rebellious minds). I registered in an underground circle and Dzerzhinsky Felix Edmundovich. The real name seemed to him too Polish and not romantic enough, and he took the nickname Astronomer. Why is this, the story is silent. Conducting agitation among poorly educated pupils and apprentices (there was enough for this education), the Astroner made some mistake, as a result of which one of the low-skilled workers he propagandized wrote a report to the police of the appropriate content - and Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky landed in the Kovno prison (1897) ). After a year of imprisonment, he was sent to Nolinsk, Vyatka province, under three-year supervision of the police, but here, too, he did not refuse from the revolutionary idea when he worked at a tobacco factory as a miner. Again the link, then escape.

A life full of romance: arrests, links and shoots

Vilna, Lithuania, Poland - these are the places on the geographical map in which Dzerzhinsky Felix Edmundovich acted at the turn of the century. His biography is full of episodes of arrests and sentences. The Warsaw citadel (1900), the Siedleck central (1901), the Vilyui transit prison (1902), the Aleksandrovka exile and the romantic escape from Verkholensk by boat. Then emigration, in which during the Social Democratic Conference of Poland and Lithuania begins a party career. Now he is the secretary of the foreign committee.

Arrests and liberation are becoming more interesting

When the war with Japan began, the Polish-Lithuanian socialist descendants (SDLPs) did their best to complicate the economic situation of the Russian Empire. Demonstrations, riots, strikes and even sabotage were actively carried out by the military wing of the party, for which its leaders were again in prison. It remains only to be surprised at the softness of the tsar's sentences. Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky in 1905 was thrown into prison. It was in July, and in October it was already amnestied. December 1906, arrest in Warsaw and the court, and in June release on bail. 1909, the sentence - lifelong Siberian exile, from which it turned out to be a simple matter, and not somewhere, but directly to Maxim Gorky in Capri. Can anyone now repeat this?

Before the Revolution

In 1910, in the life of the party secretary (and part-time treasurer) an important event occurred - he married. His chosen one was Sophia Mushkat, an associate. In his diary notes of this time there are lines about love, which gives strength to bear all deprivations. Previously, only in the struggle saw the meaning of life Dzerzhinsky Felix Edmundovich. A brief biography of him contains information that in 1910-1911 he supported the Leninist position, opposing Plekhanov with his legal methods. In 1912, he was arrested again, this time the more violent repressions were applied to the malicious rebel and fugitive - first three years of hard labor (Orel Central), then six more in Butyrka, where he might have been sitting until 1922, if not for The February Revolution.

Jacobin of the proletarian revolution

After the unification of SDPP and the RSDLP (b), Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky is immediately involved in active party work. In this period, dogma is not yet, positions are only determined, and on such an important issue as the self-determination of nations, the secretary opposes the Leninist course, but this is temporary. More important is not the word, but the case, for example, the organization of an armed coup, the formation of Red Guard fighting units and the seizure of communication centers on October 25. Dzerzhinsky was even a People's Commissar of War almost all summer of 1917, before Leonid Trotsky took over this post. Lenin called him a Jacobin, and it was a compliment. The party urgently needed a man who could create and lead a special body that punished and ruthless, and this matter was entrusted to the "iron" Felix.

Terror and a bit of Trotskyism

In December 1917, there was a real threat of an all-Russian strike of civil servants. The Council of People's Commissars reacted to it by creating the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Sabotage. Here it was headed by Dzerzhinsky (in 1922 it was renamed the OGPU) until his death. The Cheka participated in mass repressions, and its head often became the initiator of actions on the percentage destruction of the population and the complete extermination of representatives of the "parasitic classes". Only once did he terminate his duties by resigning. It happened after the murder of Mirbach, the German ambassador, committed with a view to disrupting the peace (and in fact capitulationist) negotiations in Brest. At that moment, Dzerzhinsky took the Trotskyite position, which later later repented. In all other respects, the "iron" Felix Sovnarkom arranged: he made purges, took hostages, and shot them. He did not see anything terrible in his activity.

Children, sports, repression, inner-party struggle and death

The civil war was over, and the consequences of this criminal fratricidal slaughter opened in all horror. Industry was destroyed, everywhere there was devastation, the country was flooded with street children. Five million surviving children were left without parents, and the number of deaths is impossible today. Felix Dzerzhinsky became the initiator of an important state program to grow a war-affected generation that should not only be fed, clothed and shod, but also brought up in the spirit of a new social order. For this purpose, children's homes, special detention centers and children's communes were created throughout Russia. This project can be called one of the most successful in Soviet history.

Few people today remember that Dzerzhinsky Felix Edmundovich, whose photo (especially late ones) suggest his illness, became one of the main pioneers of mass sports in the USSR. Moreover, the "Dynamo" society can be safely called his brainchild.

Remembering his own past, full of vacillations and deviations from the party line, Dzerzhinsky often stood up for the Bolsheviks, who admitted such ideological flaws. Quite possibly, if he had lived longer, he would have shared the lot of many members of the Central Committee of Lenin's recruitment, and he would have been reminded of all his "Trotskyism" and other "feces-pyatakizmy-kamenizmy" in 1937 or 1938. In a sense, he was even lucky, at least in the historical sense. During the party plenum of 1926, he so emotionally argued with his former associates and friends Pyatakov and Kamenev that his Bolshevik heart could not stand it, and by evening Comrade Dzerzhinsky had died.

He became a Soviet icon, a symbol of inflexibility, his name was called factories, factories, schools, divisions, ships and cities ...