Clean hands laborer revolution
Felix's mother, Elena Ignatievna Yanushevskaya, was the daughter of a professor at the Petersburg Railway Institute. The family had nine children, and when the father died of tuberculosis in 1882, Felix was 5 years old, the eldest of the sisters was 12, and the youngest was a little over a year old. However, Elena Ignatyevna created all the conditions for the development of children with the material support of her mother. Felix recalled: “Our mother is immortal in us. She gave me a soul, put love in it, expanded my heart and settled in it forever. ” It was the mother and elder sister Aldona who prepared Felix for entering the 1-th Vilna men's gymnasium in the year 1887.
At that time, all Polish and Catholic were persecuted by tsarist officials throughout Belarus and Lithuania, which caused legitimate protest in the young soul. The first years of study, according to the memoirs of Dzerzhinsky himself, he even dreamed of "the destruction of all Muscovites." The fracture occurred in 1894, when he became acquainted with the ideas of Marxism and saw in them a practical way of achieving justice on earth. Left without a mother in 1896, he finally chooses the path of a professional revolutionary.
In the beginning. 1897, as an agitator, he was sent to Kovno (Kaunas), an industrial city, where, as Dzerzhinsky wrote in his autobiography 1921, he “had to enter the thick of the factory masses and face unprecedented poverty and exploitation, especially of female labor. Then I learned in practice how to organize a strike. ” In the second floor. the same year, he was arrested and sent for three years to Vyatka province, from where he fled by boat and in 1899, he returned to Vilna, and then moved to Warsaw.
In February, 1900 was arrested again and held first in the 10th Pavilion of the Warsaw Citadel, and then in the Sedletskaya Prison, from where he began. November 1901 wrote to his sister: “I wholeheartedly strive to prevent injustice, crime, drunkenness, depravity, excess, excessive luxury, brothels in which people sell their bodies or souls or both together; so that there would be no oppression, fratricidal wars, national enmity ... I would like to embrace all humanity with my love, warm it and clean up the dirt of modern life ... ”
In 1906 in Stockholm at the 4 ("Unification") congress of the RSDLP, Felix Dzerzhinsky met Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, and at the 5 congress in 1907, he was elected in absentia a member of the RSDLP Central Committee. In April, Dzerzhinsky was arrested for the fifth time in 1908 in Warsaw ...
18 February 1909 of the Year in his “Prison Diary” Dzerzhinsky wrote: “At the place of execution there are permanent gallows, not temporary gallows. The doomed ones are already taken from here with their hands tied with a belt. Up to three sentenced are hanged simultaneously. When there are more of them, the three are hanged, the rest immediately wait for their turn and look at the execution of their comrades. ” Six months later, on July 11, he made the following entry: “During the execution, a detailed protocol is kept now, as the doomed behaved, his words are recorded, groans and deathliness are noted. This is done with a "scientific" purpose. "
23 June 1911, the wife of Dzerzhinsky Sofia Sigismundovna, also a professional revolutionary, had a son, Yang, born in Warsaw's Serbia Prison. However, they only met after 8 years - at that time Dzerzhinsky was already the chairman of the Cheka. He met his family on the platform, drove home, and he immediately left for service. Dzerzhinsky’s flat consisted of one room with a table and two beds ...
Dismal prison days ended for Felix Edmundovich only 1 March 1917 year, after the February Revolution swept away autocracy. Dzerzhinsky gave more than 20 years to illegal work, of which 11 spent years in prisons, exile and in hard labor. Sergei Uralov recalls his first meeting with him like this: “The day in question was special: political prisoners who had been released from Butyrka prison were brought to the Moscow Council. Among them was Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky. His tall stature and delicate features of a painfully pale face immediately attracted the attention of all those present. Handshakes, endless cheers, strong handshakes and hugs of friends, tears of joy accompanied the arrivals as they climbed to the second floor. ”
At the VI Congress of the RSDLP (b), from 8 to 16 in August in Petrograd, Dzerzhinsky was elected a member of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party. He participated in the meeting of the Central Committee, which decided on an armed uprising, was introduced to the Military Revolutionary Center. During the October Revolution he seized the General Post Office and Telegraph, then he was responsible for the protection of Smolny.
December 20 At the meeting of the SNK Dzerzhinsky on the initiative of Lenin, 1917 was appointed chairman of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission (All-Russia Emergency Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution, Sabotage and Speculation). Started in the middle. February 1918, the German attack on Petrograd created an emergency. In this regard, 21 February 1918, the Council of People's Commissars adopted a decree "Socialist fatherland in danger!". On its basis, the VChK for the first time received the right of extrajudicial (but completely legal) reprisals against "enemy agents, speculators, thugs, hooligans, counter-revolutionary agitators, German spies." A day later, “saboteurs and other parasites” were added to them, warning that the Cheka did not see any other measures besides the merciless destruction of those “at the crime scene” (News of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, February 23, 1918).
“I see the future,” Dzerzhinsky wrote to his sister, “and I want and should myself be a participant in its creation ... Have you ever wondered what war is in its real images? You repelled from yourself the images of human bodies torn apart by shells, wounded on the battlefield, and ravens pecking out the eyes of still living people. You pushed away those terrible pictures that are daily before our eyes. You can not understand me. A soldier of the revolution, fighting for the fact that there was no injustice in the world, so that this war would not give to the wealthy winners, the whole multimillion nations. War is a terrible thing. The whole world of rich men has moved on us. The most unhappy and darkest people first came to defend their rights - and give a rebuff to the whole world. Would you like me to stay away? Aldona is mine, you will not understand me, therefore it is difficult for me to write. If you saw how I live, if you looked into my eyes - you would understand, or rather, feel that I remained the same as before. ”
Recently, many excellent historical works in which it is strictly documented that the conspiracies of counterrevolution are not at all inventions of the Cheka. It is enough to skim at least a cursory glance at the study of Eduard Makarevich, Doctor of Sociology “Conspiracy of Professors. From Lenin to Brezhnev "(M., 2017) to make sure of this.
As chairman of the Cheka, Dzerzhinsky achieved the transformation of this body from a civilian institution into a centralized military organization, which was based on the principles of unity of command and the system of combat orders. In September, the 1920 of the year, all employees of the Cheka were equated to the servicemen of the Red Army. As a result, the young republic was able to withdraw from the Civil War, retaining almost the entire territory of the Russian Empire. And in this, of course, considerable merit of the KGB. According to the latest archival data, for three years 17 thousand people were shot from four bodies of the Cheka, mostly for criminal offenses (excluding the Kronstadt insurgency). A study of the minutes of meetings of emergency commissions suggests that the use of capital punishment was the exception rather than the rule.
The First World War and the Civil War left a legacy of the young Soviet republic not only ruin and famine, but also child homelessness. About 7 million homeless children wandered around the country. 27 January 1921 at the Central Executive Committee created a commission to improve the lives of children. The chairman of the commission was Dzerzhinsky. At night, on the way from Lubyanka to his apartment in the Kremlin, he often climbed into the asphalt-smelting boilers and dragged out dirty children and teenagers. Created in a large number of children's homes, “children's homes,” children's communes, colonies, boarding schools and other measures yielded results. The number of street and street children in the country has sharply decreased. Many of them later became famous scientists, writers, engineers, heroically defended our country during the Great Patriotic War. Perhaps this is a mere coincidence, but the monument to Dzerzhinsky was erected where the buildings of not only State Security, but also the Children's World department store, rise.
By the decision of the party, Dzerzhinsky, retaining the post of chairman of the OGPU, consistently shouldered all the new and new heavy responsibilities for the resuscitation of the Russian economy. In 1921, he was appointed Commissar of Communications. Having collected the best and most experienced railway transport specialists, having established discipline and control, he managed to overcome the system of thefts and mismanagement on the country's railways and organize their normal work. And since February 2 1924, Dzerzhinsky has also become the chairman of the Supreme Economic Council, that is, the head of the entire national economy of the young state. Stalin personally recommended him for this post.
Dzerzhinsky developed a very interesting “locomotive” program, the essence of which was the immediate deployment of locomotive building in the Soviet Union. According to Felix Edmundovich, an absolutely fair and reasonable opinion, the program would give the opportunity to fully load locomotive factories, which, in turn, dramatically tightened other related industries. And they need metal, respectively, locomotive building requires the advanced development of metallurgy. On the basis of the intensive growth of the metallurgical industry, it is possible to dramatically revive the metal-working industry, and accordingly, saturate the market with hardware, ensure profitability of the state industry, acquire working capital and make urgently necessary for the restoration of the fixed capital of industry. Figuratively speaking, Dzerzhinsky decided to make a locomotive the locomotive of Soviet economic growth. Stalin supported his plan, which allowed to solve the main political task - to overthrow the economic power of the peasantry by creating large commodity industries based on the large-scale use of machinery and equipment produced in Soviet factories. Hence, the main method of solving this problem was industrialization, that is, the concentration of industrial management in one headquarters and the concentration of state capital in a single industrial budget.
With his usual energy, Dzerzhinsky was actively involved in the work on the economic transformation of the country and reached, without exaggeration, fantastic results. When he became the head of the Supreme Economic Council, 1,55 million tonnes of pig iron, 1,62 million tonnes of steel were smelted in the USSR, 1,40 million tonnes of rolled products were produced. As of 20 in July, 1926, when Dzerzhinsky did not become, pig iron smelting amounted to 2,20 million tons, steel - 2,91 million tons, rolled steel production - 2,26 million tons. That is, growth reached, respectively, 70,4, 55,8 and 61,8%!
It should be noted that the load of factories in 1926 for the first time exceeded the level of 1913 of the year, making 101%. Moreover, in the same year, the USSR entered the 7-place for the smelting of iron and 6-the place for the smelting of steel in the world. Already in the 1926 year, that is, through the 2 year, the USSR accounted for 3,2% of world steel production!
And more about the success of Dzerzhinsky in the economic sphere. It was during this period that, under his leadership, the OGPU developed a highly effective system of combating economic crimes, the functions of which were assigned to the Economic Department of the OGPU. At the same time, the first stones were laid in the foundation of the extremely powerful scientific and technical intelligence of the USSR, which played a huge role in the development of the economy and the growth of the defense power of the Soviet Union.
Dzerzhinsky was an ardent opponent of the bureaucracy, its methods of governing the state and the economy, he tried with all his might to get rid of the bureaucratic "paralysis of life" and, in his words, "unheard of fuss with all sorts of approvals." He spoke out for the development of small-scale private trade, for putting the private merchant "in healthy conditions", protecting him from the arbitrariness of the officials. His works were not in vain. Until March, 1950-s in the USSR existed a developed system of private entrepreneurship, which, according to various estimates, ranged from 114 to 142 thousand private enterprises of various organizational forms (mainly artels and cooperatives) and private entrepreneurs (almost analogous to modern entrepreneurs). This system gave 6% of national GDP! And not only in the civil sectors of the economy, but also in the field of defense production and even in breakthrough, knowledge-intensive industries. Most importantly, the system operated with such a simple registration and taxation procedure that there were no obstacles to the development of private initiative.
Without using any privileges, being distinguished by genuine asceticism in everything, including refusal from personal security and food in the same dining room with ordinary employees, Felix Edmundovich worked on 18 hours a day. Eduard Herriot, the French Prime Minister, gave Dzerzhinsky the following description: “The gold of all the thrones of the world could not divert Dzerzhinsky from the intended goal. Even his implacable enemies sometimes bow their heads before his moral purity. ”
TELLS VLADIMIR DZERZHINSKY
And now we will return to our interlocutor - Vladimir Mikhailovich Dzerzhinsky. He is the grandson of Stanislav - the brother of Felix Edmundovich.
- I have been studying our family tree since 1989. We found a lot of documents, photographs and, most importantly, relatives: only 20 families live abroad (France, Switzerland). We began this work together with Felix Yanovich Dzerzhinsky, unfortunately, now deceased. Our family estate is located in the Minsk region of Belarus and is called the Museum-Estate Dzerzhinovo. It was burned down by the Germans in July 1943 and restored at the initiative of the heads of the special services of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine in 2004. The three Felix brothers graduated from universities, were highly educated people, and participated in the Resistance, working in the Gestapo under foreign names. One of the brothers, Casimir and his wife, Lucius, acted for three years in 15 km from the estate, participated in the Ivanets Krairovoy uprising, but were extradited and executed by the Germans, and the estate was burned. The same fate befell Vladislav, the famous neurologist. At one time, even before the creation of the Cheka, he was so sharply opposed to the revolutionary changes that he fell under execution. Felix Edmundovich personally signed the verdict. However, Lenin, learning of this, struck his brother from the list, saying to Felix: "We must work more with the family." But the Germans in the 1942 year, shot Vladislav. Our family honors the memory of all the brothers. September 11 The first museum opened in Ivenets in Belarus, where more 1957 items were transferred. After the Dzerzhinovo estate was restored, part of these exhibits were transferred to the museum-estate. The KGB of Belarus holds celebrations there: meetings of veterans, dedication to security officers.
- And how was the memory of the young Felix?
- He was born in a beautiful place - surrounded by forests, on the banks of the river. Naturally, the clothes quickly wore out, and he bought a new one. But he came home in worn clothes and answered the surprised questions: “I changed with my peers - they need it more”. And when he was in school, he gave breakfasts to poor children.
- Probably, in addition to a heightened sense of justice, his courage must be noted. How did he, for example, behave during the July Left Socialist-Revolutionary insurrection 6?
- Yes, after the assassination of the German ambassador von Mirbach Blumkin, he personally appeared at the left-Socialist-Revolutionary headquarters of the Cheka and, threatening with execution on the spot, demanded the immediate issuance of Blumkin. However, he himself was arrested and taken hostage by the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries. This is an act. I had to be in Butyrka prison. There in the museum there is a section dedicated to Dzerzhinsky, where notes with his words are kept that people who are not hard-working, not cruel to prisoners should work in Butyrka prison.
- Felix Edmundovich still enjoys indisputable authority among the workers of the special services, who directly declare: "We are the children of Dzerzhinsky."
- I think when Vladimir Ilyich Lenin at the Sovnarkom meeting proposed the candidacy of Felix Edmundovich, he made this choice consciously, knowing Dzerzhinsky as a dedicated wrestler, well-versed in people, knew his personal courage and perseverance, because after spending so many years in dungeons, this the man did not break or harden in the shower. Because of this, he became chairman of the Cheka.
- Lenin was convinced that, having stood at the head of a powerful organization that performs punitive functions in relation to the enemies of the revolution, Dzerzhinsky will not abuse the power given to him, will not use it for personal purposes.
- So it was. Moreover, many of the arrested counterrevolutionaries and conspirators, being arrested, sought to interrogate him specifically. Because they knew that Dzerzhinsky is fair and will understand everything. And in April, 1919, when there was a strong famine, the Council of People's Commissars issued a decree on the voluntary surrender of gold and jewelry for the purchase of bread. Being at that moment in the estate of Dzerzhinovo, he collected all the family jewels and handed over to the state. The family archive keeps his letter to his elder sister Aldone, in which he writes that he could not do otherwise, since the law is the same for everyone. And one day he came to his sister Yadviga, who lived in Moscow. And she, knowing that his brother was poorly nourished and ill, made him pancakes. He asked where she bought flour. Jadwiga confessed that she had bought from speculators. At the same moment Dzerzhinsky grabbed a plate and threw it out the window with the pancakes. He demanded from the family to strictly observe the revolutionary legitimacy. Once, when he was on treatment in Kislovodsk, he was visited by a delegation of highlanders, who, knowing that he needed increased nutrition, brought him a lamb carcass and a keg of honey. He thanked the mountaineers and asked them to give everything to the kindergarten located opposite the children. This made such a strong impression on the inhabitants of Kislovodsk, that they still remember this case.
- And how, without having the necessary education, he managed to lead the national economy and achieve enormous success?
- You know, we, relatives, think that the natural talent, which was instilled by his parents, a favorable heredity, helped. After all, his slogan “Clean hands, warm heart, cold head” is applicable not only to the work of the special services. This is the formula for the success of business executives endowed with a high sense of statehood. It is relevant nowadays as a formula for overcoming bureaucratic lawlessness and corruption. Hence the ability to select personnel, properly arrange people, set tasks for them.
- Well, then the conclusion is: if a person did so much for the country, giving himself completely to the people, why did they so ungratefully treat his memory? Should we correct the mistake and return the monument?
- Dzerzhinsky was strict, but fair. 18 days before his death, he wrote to the government that against the policy being pursued - against the domination of officials, state blowouts, paperwork, disregard for people. And in the same note, he raises the issue of unjustified repression and unnecessary course rigidity. That is exactly what he is accused of today, he, on the contrary, struggled with it. And this is documented. And at the last plenum, after which he suffered a heart attack, he said, addressing the audience: “I will never spare myself, I always tell the truth.” He worried about the people, so that there would be neither poverty, nor oppression, nor national hostility, so that the country would be strong. Therefore, his name was assigned to the streets, factories, groups, and in 1958, the decision was made to erect a monument to him in the center of Moscow on Dzerzhinsky Square. And until 1991, this monument of the work of an outstanding sculptor Vuchetich fit perfectly into the architecture of the square, was the pride of the descendants of this great man. According to numerous polls across the country, the percentage of 70 – 80 for the return of the monument. Dzerzhinsky’s return to Lubyanka Square will not be a return to the past. It will be a reminder to law enforcement agencies of the ever-current motto: "Clean hands, a warm heart, a cold head."
- Andrey VEDYAEV
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