British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences

 

BA PDF Symposium 2004: Abstracts

21 April 2004

Dr Iain Lauchlan

Terror in Utopia: Felix Dzerzhinsky and the Russian Revolution

In this paper I will present a brief biographical portrait of the creator of the Cheka, progenitor of the infamous KGB. Newly declassified Russian archival sources have allowed me to become the first western researcher to begin work on a full biography of one of the Soviet Union’s most influential founding fathers. Felix Dzerzhinsky was a bundle of contradictions and the organization he created came to embody many of the paradoxical elements of his personality. He was a devout Catholic would-be priest who went on to become a militant atheist in his teens. He spent his early adulthood as a subversive, fugitive, revolutionary and convict and his middle age as a policeman and jailor. He turned his back on a youthful flirtation with Polish national Romanticism to become a Marxist internationalist and even, according to some critics, a Great Russian chauvinist. During the Russian revolution and civil war Dzerzhinsky was a ruthless tyrant; yet he was apparently tortured by his guilty conscience, even begging Lenin et al. to shoot him in recompense for his crimes. Dzerzhinsky’s image as honest policeman and pillar of the Communist state was, with the exception of Lenin, the most enduring of personality cults in the Soviet period (and the toppling of his statue provided the symbolic end to the USSR); yet many now point out that in later life he advocated a degree of free market capitalism and grew disillusioned with his own creation, the monstrous bureaucratic-terror machine. Dzerzhinsky met an untimely end – aged 48: he collapsed with heart failure after delivering a frenzied two-hour speech. Many have posited his death was a crucial turning point in the rise of Stalin (and some have even suggested that he was murdered by Stalin); yet Dzerzhinsky’s last speech was a passionate assault on Stalin’s enemies and few could have doubted his dangerous, ruthless fanaticism.

Iain Lauchlan studied for his BA and PhD at the University of Leeds, 1990-1998. His PhD thesis focussed on the notorious Okhrana and has since been expanded into a book: Russian Hide and Seek: The Tsarist Secret Police in St Petersburg, 1906-1914 (Helsinki, 2002). He has continued research on the newly declassified archives of the Russian secret police with Iain’s latest project on the early Stalinist OGPU. He has taught Russian and European History at the Universities of Leeds, Manchester, Helsinki, Tampere and Oxford. Iain has just been offered a lectureship at the University of Stirling to commence in October 2004.