Felix Dzerzhinsky

A biography of the founder of the Soviet secret police, written for the 110th anniversary of his birth.

It covers the Polish revolutionary underground, the years of imprisonment and exile, 1917, the founding of the Cheka in December 1917 and the civil war, and then the part of Dzerzhinsky's career that Soviet accounts always emphasised: the campaign against homeless children, the rebuilding of the railways, and his chairmanship of the Supreme Economic Council from 1924 until his death in 1926.

As institutional self-portraiture it is a document of the first order. The authorities its closing page reaches for are not Lenin but the Twenty-Seventh Congress and then Yuri Andropov, quoted from a speech marking Dzerzhinsky's centenary in September 1977 - Andropov who was then Chairman of the KGB.

The spine says 1988; the book says otherwise. Near the end the authors note that a hundred and ten years have passed since Dzerzhinsky's birth and over sixty since his death, which dates the text to 1987. Everything agrees: the last political event it knows is the Twenty-Seventh Congress of 1986, and the introduction still announces developed socialism, Brezhnev's formula, while adopting in the next breath the vocabulary of accelerating socio-economic development. Perestroika and glasnost do not appear, and no source cited postdates 1985.

It reaches English readers as an artefact of the moment just before the argument broke open, wearing a jacket from the moment it did.

Translated by Natalia Belskaya.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.