Putin’s Use of Dzerzhinsky Echoes Soviet History and His Own Past but May Be Harbinger of More Repression, Historian Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 29 – Vladimir Putin’s use of Feliks Dzerzhinsky resembles the use Soviet leaders put the founder of the Cheka to after the death of Stalin and Putin’s own use of Yury Andropov to send a message about the organs to the Russian people, Rustam Aleksander says. But it is even more worrisome because it may be a harbinger of more repression ahead.

            After ousting and then executing Lavrenty Beriya, Stalin’s last secret police chief, the Soviet dictator’s successors elevated Dzerzhinsky to an almost sacred status to suggest that real Soviet secret policemen were not guilty of the viciousness which characterized Beria’s actions, the popular historian says (novayagazeta.eu/articles/2026/04/29/feliks-vozvrashchaetsia).

            In December 1958, the Khrushchev leadership even erected a statue of Dzerzhinsky in Moscow’s Lubyanka Square; but in 1991, during the failed coup attempt, the Russian people attacked the status and pulled it down, a highly symbolic action that suggested the new Russia would not be like the old.      

            But shortly before coming to power, Putin, himself a KGB officer and then head of the FSB, came to power, sought to use Yury Andropov in a similar way, to suggest that the Russian security services were models of competence and professionalism and that he Putin was committed to following in that tradition.

            Now, instead of continuing to boost Andropov as a role model, Putin is suggesting that Dzerzhinsky is, and that, Aleksander says, “clearly signals something else entirely.” His moves in this direction are “no longer about restoring respect but rather about establishing fear and arbitrary power as the fundamental principles of Russia’s special services.”

            And that raises “a more troubling question: Is this a symbolic warning about the FSB’s future trajectory toward harsher repression or is it an actual admission that fear and repression have already become the norm in present-day Russia that that the rising generation of security officers will only intensify that?”