Dzerzhinsky Quotes

Trust, but verify.

We stand for organized terror - this should be frankly admitted. Terror is an absolute necessity during times of revolution. Our aim is to fight against the enemies of the Soviet Government and of the new order of life. We judge quickly. In most cases only a day passes between the apprehension of the criminal and his sentence. When confronted with evidence criminals in almost every case confess; and what argument can have greater weight than a criminal's own confession?

Feliks Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka—Lenin’s secret police, the forerunner of the KGB— personally kept a little black notebook in which he scribbled down the names and addresses of random “enemies” he came across while doing his job.12

This is a man who has shown a complete disregard for human life, cynicism and hypocrisy, and a willingness to use war and the deaths of thousands of Russian soldiers and innocent civilians as a PR instrument in his election campaign. This is a man who raised a toast on the anniversary of Stalin’s birth, had the plaque commemorating former KGB head Yury Andropov restored to its place on the wall of the Lubyanka—Federal Security Service headquarters—and dreams of seeing the statue of butcher Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret police, stand once again in the center of Moscow.

The Bolsheviks were atheists but they were hardly secular politicians in the conventional sense: they stooped to kill from the smugness of the highest moral eminence. Bolshevism may not have been a religion, but it was close enough. Stalin told Beria the Bolsheviks were “a sort of military-religious order.” When Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka, died, Stalin called him “a devout knight of the proletariat.” Stalin’s “order of sword-bearers” resembled the Knights Templars, or even the theocracy of the Iranian Ayatollahs, more than any traditional secular movement. They would die and kill for their faith in the inevitable progress towards human betterment, making sacrifices of their own families, with a fervour seen only in the religious slaughters and martyrdoms of the Middle Ages—and the Middle East. They

To be a bright torch for others, to be able to shed light—that is the supreme happiness which man can achieve. He who achieves this fears neither suffering, pain, sorrow nor need. Death no longer holds terrors for him, although it is only then that he learns really to love life.

I do not know how to hate by halves or to love by halves. I do not know how to give only half of my heart. I can give all my heart or I give nothing. I have drunk from the cup of life not only all the bitterness, but all the sweetness as well, and if anyone says to me: take a look at the wrinkles on your brow, at your emaciated body, at the life you now lead, take a look and recognise that life has broken you, then I would reply: life has not broken me but I have broken life, it has not taken everything from me, but I have taken everything from it with my whole being and spirit! Yes, indeed!

I love life as it really is, in its eternal movement, in its harmony, and in its terrible contradictions. And my eyes still see, my ears hear, my soul is receptive and my heart has not yet hardened. And the song of life sings in my heart.... And it seems to me that whoever hears this song in his heart will never curse his life, no matter what torments he has endured, will never exchange it for the other, peaceful, normal life. For this song is everything, this song of the love of life alone remains. Both here in prison, and out there in liberty, where there are now so many horrors, it lives and is eternal as the stars: the stars and all the beauty of nature give birth to it and carry it to human hearts, and these hearts sing out and strive eternally for resurrection.

After the Russian Civil War, Soviet intelligence and counterintelligence officers would pride themselves on being nondescript. They wore suits and ties. They shaved. They got haircuts. They were no more tough-looking than anybody else you saw on the street. Under Dzerzhinsky, though, a menacing appearance was de rigueur for a headhunter. That included a heavy beard stubble. All Bolsheviks who weren’t at a top level were supposed to look shoddy, DeWitt Poole later wrote.

What the Allies didn’t know at the time was that the previous day at noon, the GDR’s minister of defense Heinz Keßler had declared a state of emergency for the NVA and that as a result thirty thousand troops were now on standby, which included the Felix Dzerzhinsky Guards Regiment. This was an elite Stasi-run, motorized formation

The Cheka’s early priorities were overwhelmingly domestic. It was, said Dzerzhinsky, ‘an organ for the revolutionary settlement of accounts with counter-revolutionaries’, a label increasingly applied to all the Bolsheviks’ opponents and ‘class enemies’.

The little commissar in Russian leather boots and party tunic—his habitual costume in the twenties and thirties—was not in fact the person of steel self-control that his adopted name and normal public demeanor suggested. Behind the scenes, according to testimony from numerous sources, he was frequently moody and prone to outbursts of temper.[357] He could work with prodigious energy, but he could also be indolent. His vindictive disposition became proverbial in upper party circles owing to a remark he made in conversation with Kamenev and Dzerzhinsky over wine one summer day in 1923. The three men began to speak of what they loved most in life. As Kamenev later related the story to Trotsky, Stalin said: “The greatest delight is to mark one’s enemy, prepare everything, avenge oneself thoroughly, and then go to sleep.”[358] This became known among Stalin’s party comrades as his theory of sweet revenge. They considered it a self-revealing confession.