The spine says 1988. The book does not.
Near the end of the final chapter the authors write: "One hundred and ten years have passed since Dzerzhinsky's birth, over sixty years have passed since his death." Dzerzhinsky was born in 1877 and died in 1926. The sentence dates itself to 1987. Everything else in the text agrees. The last political event the book knows about is the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress of February–March 1986, invoked twice — once in the introduction, once in the closing pages, where the Soviet people "have begun work to implement the congress' decisions and attain the targets set for the Twelfth Five-Year Plan," which ran 1986 to 1990. The introduction still announces that "The world's first socialist country has entered the stage of developed socialism" — Brezhnev's formula, not Gorbachev's — while in the next breath adopting the new vocabulary of "accelerating the country's socio-economic development." That is the language of uskorenie, the 1985–86 phase, before perestroika had displaced it. The word perestroika does not appear in the book. Neither does glasnost. No source cited postdates 1985.
So this is a Russian text written in 1986–87 for the 110th anniversary of Dzerzhinsky's birth, translated by Natalia Belskaya and issued in English by Progress in 1988. The distinction matters more here than in almost any other volume in this series. 1988 was the year of the Nineteenth Party Conference, the year Soviet newspapers printed the Terror, the year Memorial was founded to count and name the dead. A biography of the founder of the Soviet secret police published in that year would have to answer for something. A biography written a year or two earlier, on an anniversary schedule, does not — and this one does not. It reaches English readers as an artefact of the moment just before the argument broke open, wearing a jacket from the moment it did.
The commission is legible in the book's last citation. Not Lenin, not a Party congress: the authorities the final page reaches for are the Twenty-Seventh Congress and then Yuri Andropov, quoted from a speech of 9 September 1977 marking Dzerzhinsky's centenary — Andropov who was then Chairman of the KGB. The book is a work of institutional self-description. It is the security organs' account of their own founder, produced by a team of historians under Semyon Khromov as editor-in-chief, working from the Central Party Archives and describing itself, without irony, as "a scientific biography."
Set the argument aside for a moment, because the first three chapters are worth having. Dzerzhinsky was born on the family's small estate near the Nalibokskaya Pushcha to a consumptive schoolmaster who died when the boy was five, joined the Social-Democratic Party of Lithuania at eighteen, and spent eleven years — a quarter of his life — in tsarist prisons, penal servitude and Siberian exile. He escaped twice. He was sentenced to life exile in Siberia in 1909 and to three years' hard labour in 1914. The book's account of this, built on his letters to his sister Aldona and to his wife Sofia, on Sofia Dzerzhinskaya's memoir, and on Polish-language recollections that have never appeared in English, is straightforward biography and largely reliable. It is also, in places, unexpectedly fine. His mother told the children stories about "the indemnities levied against the people, the reprisals against them, and vexing taxes," and he wrote to Sofia in 1914 that "every violent act I learned about, I felt as an act of violence against me personally." In 1902 he led a rising in the Siedlce prison yard; the prisoners disarmed the wardens, raised a red flag over the walls, and elected him chairman of what they declared a "free republic." Sofia gave birth to their son in a Warsaw cell and kept him there for the first eight months of his life. Nothing in this material is in serious dispute, and no English biography assembles it as fully.
His personal incorruptibility is not in dispute either. The book supplies the anecdote from Dmitry Sverchkov about the glass of milk in the railway carriage in Siberia in 1922, which Dzerzhinsky refused as "an absolutely inadmissible luxury, an unpardonable extravagance." Everything known about him supports it. The chapters on transport after 1921 and on the Supreme Economic Council after 1924 describe real work: the winter mission to Siberia to move grain and seed to the famine districts of the Volga, the reconstruction of the railways, the beginnings of Soviet tractor and aircraft manufacture. And the chapter on the besprizorniki, the millions of children orphaned and abandoned by the civil war, records something genuinely humane. Lunacharsky's recollection of Dzerzhinsky bursting into his office is one of the most attractive passages in the book: "One can't help thinking when looking at the children that everything is really for them! The fruits of the revolution are not for us, they are for them!" The Children's Commission he chaired from January 1921 reached, on the book's own accounting, four million of five and a half million children, and left one and a half million untouched, which the authors state plainly.
But read Dzerzhinsky's circular of the same day to the local Chekas, which the book also prints, and the shape of the whole problem appears in a single sentence: "Caring for the children is the surest way to eradicate counter-revolution."
That is not cynicism. It is the honest thought of a man for whom every human question had become a security question, because he was running the organ that had been given every human question to answer.
The book's account of that organ begins on 7 December 1917. Dzerzhinsky reported to the Council of People's Commissars on the commission he proposed. Its purpose was, first, "to cut short and foil all counter-revolutionary efforts and sabotage activities throughout Russia, no matter from where they may proceed"; second, "To turn over to the Revolutionary Tribunal all saboteurs and counter-revolutionaries, and to develop methods of combating them"; third, "The commission will conduct only a preliminary investigation, to the extent required by effective counteraction." He asked for the right to confiscate property, evict people from their lodgings, cancel their ration cards and publish their names.
Take that founding charter seriously, because the book prints it and then narrates its dismantling without noticing. Point two hands the accused to a court. Point three restricts the commission to preliminary investigation. Within a year the Cheka was shooting people, and within five the same body — under Dzerzhinsky, and by decree of October 1922 which the book records without comment — was "granted the right to execute participants in bandit raids and armed robberies without a court trial." The distance between the December 1917 charter and the October 1922 decree is the whole history the book declines to write. It presents both as achievements.
On the Red Terror the book gives a single sentence and a footnote. After Uritsky's assassination and the shooting of Lenin on 30 August 1918, the Council of People's Commissars "passed a resolution on red terror as a temporary extraordinary measure of the proletarian state's self-defence, a response to white terror," and Dzerzhinsky is quoted calling it "nothing but an expression of the will of the poorest peasantry and the proletariat — to check all attempts at a revolt, and to win." The footnote reads, in full: "Mass red terror was stopped in early November 1918."
There are no numbers. There is no decree on concentration camps — the phrase "concentration camp" does not occur in the book, nor does the word "hostage," nor any account of the hostage-taking that the Cheka practised systematically in 1918–19. Executions are never described, only implied, and the word "shot" appears in this book overwhelmingly in connection with tsarist troops shooting workers. The entire concession the authors make runs to three lines: "True, a number of mistakes were made in the process. Some innocent persons were arrested; searches, especially in the provinces, were sometimes made without adhering to the rules of procedure, and the investigation of cases was at times too prolonged. A shortage of experienced personnel exacerbated the situation." Procedural irregularity and understaffing. That is the sum.
Meanwhile the book's own definition of the enemy quietly expands. Describing 1919 it explains that the Mensheviks and SRs had "instigated strikes at war industry factories and revolts in the army," and that this "made it imperative to introduce harsher punitive measures." A strike at a war factory is a strike by workers. The reader is invited to file it under counter-revolution and move on.
The silences are the finding, and they are specific and checkable. Search the text of this book and you will not find the word Kronstadt. Not once. The Tenth Party Congress of March 1921 appears only in a footnote, as a source for a Lenin quotation about Warsaw. Tambov is named three times, always as a place where bandits and kulaks were active, never as a peasant war put down with poison gas. Nor is there any mention of the Georgian affair of 1922–23 — the commission Dzerzhinsky himself chaired, whose findings provoked Lenin's furious last notes on Great-Russian chauvinism. The word "Georgian" does not appear in the book. Ordzhonikidze appears three times, all in 1917 contexts, and never in connection with Georgia at all.
Above all, the institution is never followed past 1923. The Cheka becomes the GPU in February 1922 and the OGPU in November 1923, and there the lineage stops. The letters NKVD appear only in their 1919 sense, as the Commissariat for Internal Affairs Dzerzhinsky ran alongside the Cheka. Yagoda, Yezhov and Beria are absent. The year 1937 appears exactly once in the entire book, and it appears like this — a footnote explaining that the All-Russia Central Executive Committee was "The supreme legislative, administrative and controlling body of state authority in Soviet Russia in 1917–37." A terminal date, no cause given. There is a second such date. The introduction lists among the book's sources the documents of "the Communist Party of Poland (1918–1938)." Both parentheses close on a catastrophe the authors will not name.
That second one deserves a moment, because it makes the omission personal rather than abstract. The Polish Communist Party was dissolved by the Comintern in 1938 and its leadership destroyed. Adolf Warski, whom this book's introduction names as one of Dzerzhinsky's "first biographers," was shot in the Soviet Union in 1937. So was Julian Leński, quoted admiringly in the twelfth chapter as the party's former General Secretary. Józef Unszlicht, Dzerzhinsky's deputy at the Vecheka and a recurring figure here; Martyn Latsis, whom Dzerzhinsky brought onto the commission in May 1918; Jānis Peters, Deputy Chairman of the Vecheka, quoted in the conclusion on Dzerzhinsky's modesty; Artur Artuzov, who ran the Savinkov operation — all were shot in 1937–38 by the organisation Dzerzhinsky founded. The book's roster of witnesses is substantially a roster of the executed, and it says so of none of them.
There is also the standard falsification of 1917, which by 1987 had been abandoned in Soviet scholarship for thirty years and survives here intact. The introduction states that Dzerzhinsky "was one of the members of the Party Centre directing" the October insurrection. Chapter Four elaborates: "The Central Committee meeting elected the Revolutionary Military Centre to exercise leadership over the uprising. The members were Yakov Sverdlov, Joseph Stalin, Andrei Bubnov, Moissei Uritsky and Felix Dzerzhinsky." Some fourteen pages then describe the work of the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee — its round-the-clock guard, its commissars, its proclamation on 25 October — without ever naming its chairman. Trotsky's name does not occur in this book. Not in 1917, not in the civil war, not in the succession struggle, not anywhere. Stalin's occurs twice, both times in this same 1917 material, both times favourably.
Finally there is the death. Dzerzhinsky collapsed on 20 July 1926 after speaking at a Central Committee plenum, and died in his Kremlin flat at 4.40 that afternoon. The book's framing is: "Representatives of the opposition were trying to paint a distorted picture of the country's economic development, and a well-substantiated rebuff was strongly needed to dash their hopes and expose their errors. Dzerzhinsky's report did just that." The opposition is not named, its arguments are not stated, and the reader is not told that the man Dzerzhinsky spent his last two hours refuting was Trotsky's ally Kamenev, or that the United Opposition had been formed three months earlier. That he died at fifty in the middle of that fight is the one thing about his death the book is not willing to make anything of. It prefers "a soldier killed in battle."
The answer to this book already exists, and it is more interesting than a denunciation, because the anti-Stalinist left did not treat Dzerzhinsky as a villain.
Trotsky, who bore direct responsibility for the repression of Kronstadt, defended it and him. In More on the Suppression of Kronstadt, written in 1938 against Victor Serge, he wrote: "Concerning the repressions, as far as I remember, Dzerzhinsky had personal charge of them and Dzerzhinsky could not tolerate anyone's interference with his functions (and properly so)." And then: "Whether there were any needless victims I do not know. On this score I trust Dzerzhinsky more than his belated critics." He would not soften it. "But I am ready to recognize that civil war is no school of humanism... In this sense I carry full and complete responsibility for the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion." A reader who wants the case for Kronstadt's suppression put honestly by a participant will find it there, and will find no comfort in it. That is the point of reading it.
The sharper statement is earlier. On 4 January 1930, after the GPU shot Yakov Blumkin for carrying a letter from Trotsky, Trotsky wrote the piece published in Biulleten' Oppozitsii as Jakob Blumkin Shot by the Stalinists. Its argument is precisely the one this Progress volume cannot make:
During the years of the civil war, the Cheka carried out grim work. But this was done under the control of the party. Hundreds of times from inside the party there came protests, declarations, and demands for explanations about one sentence or another. At the head of the Cheka stood Dzerzhinsky, a man of outstanding moral authority... This altogether constituted the guarantee that the Cheka was a weapon of the revolutionary dictatorship. Now the party is strangled.
Against Dzerzhinsky he sets what came after: Menzhinsky, "not a man but the shadow of one," and Yagoda, "a despicable careerist who has tied his fortune to Stalin, and who is ready to perform anything he is told to do, without thinking and without questioning." Blumkin, he concludes, "has been shot — by decision of the GPU. That could have happened only because the GPU has become Stalin's personal instrument."
This is a serious argument and it should not be accepted uncritically. It rests on a distinction — Cheka under party control, GPU as one man's instrument — that assumes the party could indefinitely control an organ it had exempted from the courts. By 1930 Trotsky had a great deal of evidence that it could not, including the fact that he was writing from Turkey. He was, moreover, a witness in his own cause: the same 1939 reply to Serge that concedes secret trials "greatly increase the possibility of mistakes" defends them as an unavoidable feature of civil war, and never confronts the question of what happens when the emergency organ outlives the emergency. That is the argument Trotsky did not make, and the honest thing is to say so.
The Fourth International came closer to making it. Writing in 1951 about Yugoslavia's secret police, Ernest Mandel — as E. Germain — put the general proposition in one line: "its existence, like the existence of the Cheka in Russia, is not a proof of the strength, but of the weakness of the revolution." That is the sentence this book cannot contain. Everything in it treats the Vecheka as evidence of the revolution's power — "a strong shield and an avenging sword," in the conclusion's phrase, headed by a man who was "at the same time a deeply humane and just arbiter with the power to decide a person's fate." Read that formulation twice. An arbiter with the power to decide a person's fate, and no court above him, is not a description of justice. It is a description of what justice is replaced by.
There is one more piece of the reply, and it bears directly on this book's own text. The list of five names that Chapter Four gives for the "Revolutionary Military Centre" is not an invention of the Progress authors; it is the minute of the Central Committee meeting of 16 October 1917, and Trotsky quoted the same minute in his 1937 The Stalin School of Falsification (chapter four, "Letter to the Bureau of Party History") in order to demolish the use being made of it. Neither Trotsky nor Lenin belonged to the body, he pointed out, which "alone demonstrates that the committee had only a subordinate organizational significance." The five were sent to reinforce the Military Revolutionary Committee. "Superfluous, it would seem, for Trotsky to be introduced a second time into the staff of an organization of which he was already chairman! How hard it is, after all, to correct history after the event!" Fifty years later, on a biography of one of those five, the correction was still standing.
What is the reader to make of Dzerzhinsky, then? The objection from this tradition has never been that a revolution has no right to defend itself. It is that Dzerzhinsky was given an extraordinary commission — the word is in its name, and it meant temporary — and that the commission was never wound up. It acquired the power to kill without trial, then kept it; it was renamed, then renamed again; it survived the emergency that justified it, then the leader who founded it, then the party that was supposed to control it, and finally it consumed most of the people named as sources in this book. Dzerzhinsky did not intend that and did not live to see it. But he built the mechanism, he defended its exemption from the courts, and in his last years he chaired the commission on Georgia that Lenin said he could not trust for impartiality. That is a political record, not a moral verdict, and it is the record this biography exists to prevent its readers from assembling.
Read the first three chapters for the man. Read Chapters Five and Six for what an institution says about itself when it is allowed to write its own history and nobody asks it about the years after 1926. Then read the footnote about 1917–37, and the parenthesis around 1918–1938, and notice that the authors could count.