Russia and the Cult of State Security

The Chekist Tradition, From Lenin to Putin

Julie Fedor

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136671852
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Histoire
• Categoria: Histoire de la Russie

This book explores the mythology woven around the Soviet secret police and the Russian cult of state security that has emerged from it.

Tracing the history of this mythology from the Soviet period through to its revival in contemporary post-Soviet Russia, the volume argues that successive Russian regimes have sponsored a 'cult' of state security, whereby security organs are held up as something to be worshipped. The book approaches the history of this cult as an ongoing struggle to legitimise and sacralise the Russian state security apparatus, and to negotiate its violent and dramatic past. It explores the ways in which, during the Soviet period, this mythology sought to make the existence of the most radically intrusive and powerful secret police in history appear 'natural'. It also documents the contemporary post-Soviet re-emergence of the cult of state security, examining the ways in which elements of the old Soviet mythology have been revised and reclaimed as the cornerstone of a new state ideology.

The Russian cult of state security is of ongoing contemporary relevance, and is crucial for understanding not only the tragedies of Russia's twentieth-century history, but also the ambiguities of Russia's post-Soviet transition, and the current struggle to define Russia's national identity and future development. The book examines the ways in which contemporary Russian life continues to be shaped by the legacy of Soviet attitudes to state-society relations, as expressed in the reconstituted cult of state security. It investigates the shadow which the figure of the secret policeman continues to cast over Russia today.

The book will be of great interest to students of modern Russian history and politics, intelligence studies and security studies, as well as readers with an interest in the KGB and its successors.

Part I

Soviet Chekism

1 Dzerzhinsky’s Commandments

In the perception of enemies, trembling at his very name, Dzerzhinsky figures as some sort of demon, some sort of wizard of Bolshevism… Dzerzhinsky is omnipresent, Dzerzhinsky is everywhere merciless, Dzerzhinsky breaks all obstacles on his path. Enemies do not understand, cannot understand, that Dzerzhinsky’s ‘satanic all-roundedness’, [his] ‘good luck’, flow from the fact that all the greatness and all the might of our class, its passionate will to struggle and to victory, its deepest creative forces, were embodied in Dzerzhinsky.¹

This front-page Pravda editorial deriding Dzerzhinsky’s critics for their primitive fear of his power was published shortly after Dzerzhinsky’s death in July 1926. I have chosen this passage to open my introduction to the Soviet cult of Dzerzhinsky, because it conveys some sense of the bizarre range and mixture of powers and properties that were attributed to Dzerzhinsky. The cult that surrounded the figure of Dzerzhinsky was a highly distinctive and vivid leadership cult,² abundant in apparent contradictions and surprises. In this introductory tour, I shall approach the cult through what Robert Darnton would call its ‘opaque’ moments: the points where it is at its most strange and puzzling, the better to grasp hold of it with a view to unravelling its meaning.³ We shall see the founder of the Soviet secret police and executor of the Red Terror compared to a sunbeam; weeping tears of love and compassion; cradling an orphaned child in his arms; and gazing into people’s souls. Diabolical to his enemies, a saint to his friends, the figure of Dzerzhinsky seems to have functioned as a vehicle for all kinds of fantasies and fears. More officially, he served to represent the ideal chekist, and it is in this capacity – as the incarnation of the chekist ethos – that I will mostly be concerned with the figure of Dzerzhinsky here. In this chapter, I provide an introduction to the Soviet cult of Dzerzhinsky, outlining those conventions and motifs which remained more or less constant throughout the cult’s existence. This preliminary sketch of the cult’s main contours will set the scene for subsequent chapters in which we shall explore the ways in which this cult was modified at particular historical moments.

The Pravda editorial reproduced above conveys a sense of Dzerzhinsky’s status as a mythic, larger-than-life figure. Symbolically, Dzerzhinsky functioned as the emblematic and quintessential chekist. His symbolic status as the archetypical chekist was underlined insistently in Soviet discourse. Upon dying, Dzerzhinsky was said to have ‘merged with the ChK, which became his embodiment’.⁴ This message was reinforced in poems such as Bezymenskii’s ‘Feliks’ (extracts of which were published in Pravda to mark the ninth jubilee of the Cheka in December 1926),⁵ in which a father explains to his little son that ‘Feliks’ and ‘the VChK’ are one and the same thing.⁶ This status as archetype or prototype was also flagged by one of Dzerzhinsky’s key sobriquets: ‘the first chekist’. In fact, it is impossible to detach or disentangle the figure of Dzerzhinsky from the term ‘chekist’, since the two were practically synonymous. Any examination of the term ‘chekist’ must thus begin with Dzerzhinsky. Dzerzhinsky was absolutely central to the corporate identity of the institution and insofar as the term ‘chekist’ has meaning, this meaning is derived from and associated with the figure of Dzerzhinsky.⁷

The whole semantic universe of Soviet chekism turned on the figure of Dzerzhinsky. He provided the focus for the vast majority of chekist rites and traditions. Key dates from Dzerzhinsky’s life punctuated and organized the chekist official calendar. Thus, for example, new foreign intelligence officers were sworn into the service on the anniversary of Dzerzhinsky’s birthday (11 September),⁸ and chekist salaries were paid on the eleventh of the month.⁹ Rituals venerating Dzerzhinsky operated in broader society, too; in the late Soviet period, for example, young people were mobilized to undertake pilgrimages (agitpokhody) to various sacred sites related to Dzerzhinsky’s life,¹⁰ and Soviet children’s homes often featured a special ugolok devoted to Dzerzhinsky.¹¹ There was a vast body of hagiographical literature on Dzerzhinsky, including such works as Soldier of Great Battles: The Life and Work of F. E. Dzerzhinsky (1961); Knight of the Revolution (1967); Dzerzhinsky in My Life (1987); and Feliks Means Happy (1974) – to name but a few. Dzerzhinsky was also the key protagonist in the Soviet security apparatus’ elaborate foundation myth, as we shall see below.

One of the most striking features of the Soviet hagiographical literature on Dzerzhinsky are the ubiquitous but opaque references to his ‘moral purity’,¹² ‘moral beauty’¹³ and ‘moral talent’.¹⁴ This preoccupation with Dzerzhinsky as first and foremost a moral figure points to the strong connection between the chekist and the new Soviet morality being forged. This struggle often came to be focused in the figure of the chekist. In the early Soviet struggle to overhaul morality, the chekist was on the front line. It was the chekist who manned the camps in which criminals and enemies underwent ‘reforging’ (perekovka); it was the chekist who, having removed the priests, now took confession; and it was first and foremost the chekist who was defying and transgressing the old moral codes, now declared to be defunct. As Nadezhda Mandelstam put it, ‘The Chekists were the avant-garde of the “new people”, and they had indeed basically revised, in the manner of the Superman, all ordinary human values’.¹⁵ This connection remained present throughout the whole Soviet period, albeit in somewhat modified form. The figure of the chekist was central to the new moral universe being created – the chekist was both embodiment and chief executor of the new moral code. In what follows, I shall explore some of the linkages between the figure of the Dzerzhinsky and morality, showing how and why Dzerzhinsky’s claim to the title of a great humanitarian was supported and sustained.

The Dzerzhinsky Vita

The first official hagiography of Dzerzhinsky appeared immediately after his death in July 1926. Two days after Dzerzhinsky died, the state publishing house Gosizdat rushed through the publication of a small 32-page book on Dzerzhinsky, containing reprints of government reports of his death, obituaries, a brief autobiography and speeches. It was recommended in Pravda that ‘every worker’ in the USSR should obtain a copy of this book, pending the publication of more comprehensive works.¹⁶

After his death, Dzerzhinsky was elevated into the realm of the symbolic and the elemental. Bukharin’s obituary underlined the fact that Dzerzhinsky was more than human, more than a mere mortal: ‘It is as though the boiling lava of revolution, and not simple human blood, flowed and seethed in his veins.’¹⁷ Other metaphors used made a similar point. One tribute described Dzerzhinsky as a kind of walking monument, ‘a figure, seemingly hewn out of a single block of granite’.¹⁸

The standard, stylized image of Dzerzhinsky as it subsequently emerged in Soviet discourse was more icon-like than that of any other Soviet leader.¹⁹ The Dzerzhinsky cult’s dominant notes of ‘sternness’ and ‘sorrowfulness’ recall the saints of Orthodox icons.²⁰ The tenor of the cult generally has a distinctive mournfulness about it. As Hingley puts it, Soviet historians presented the Cheka’s actions as conducted ‘in a spirit more of sorrow than of anger under the inspiration of the saintly Dzerzhinsky’.²¹ Unlike Lenin or Stalin, Dzerzhinsky is frequently depicted as ‘sad’, ‘tired’; emotionally drained by the strain of his work. In the Khrushchev era, these qualities made the Dzerzhinsky cult exceptional amongst Soviet leadership cults. As Tumarkin has shown, this was a period in which the sorrowful and the funereal were largely banished from Soviet public life, and from the Lenin cult in particular, which was refashioned in an ‘upbeat’ style, in keeping with the tenor of the period.²²

The language used to describe Dzerzhinsky is often strikingly religious. One 1936 tribute to Dzerzhinsky, for example, speaks of the ‘incorruptible… image of Dzerzhinsky, his thin, spiritual face with high cheekbones and sunken cheeks, with a meek mouth and a burning gaze, saturated with rage and sorrow’, and asserts that ‘the very essence of Dzerzhinsky… was the most profound longing [toska] for the construction of the new life’.²³ More than any other Soviet leader, Dzerzhinsky combined the qualities of the martyr and the ascetic.

The religious elements and tenor of the Dzerzhinsky cult have their roots partly in Dzerzhinsky’s own biography. He was intensely religious as a boy and felt a calling as a priest, until he abandoned religion after converting to the revolutionary cause. His writings are permeated by religious imagery. He wrote, for example, of the ‘sacred spark’ that burned within him, sustaining him on his revolutionary path and lending him strength ‘even on the bonfire of persecutions’.²⁴ He also wrote that ‘The more horrifying the hell of this life, the most clearly and loudly I hear the eternal hymn of life, the hymn of truth, beauty and happiness, and there is no place within me for despair. Life is joyful even when one has to wear legirons’.²⁵

The marked religious overtones of the Dzerzhinsky cult are further exemplified by one of its key motifs: that of light – the conventional signifier of the presence of the divine in hagiographic literature. Thus, for example, for Buikis, ‘There was something bright, something special, in him [Dzerzhinsky]. It was as though he radiated warmth, penetrating into the soul’.²⁶ Dzerzhinsky himself once wrote that he aspired ‘To be a bright ray for others, to radiate light – this is the highest happiness which a person can attain’, words which Soviet accounts presented as best encapsulating his character, as ‘the best commentary to F. E. Dzerzhinsky’s life, work and ideals’.²⁷ Dzerzhinsky’s connection with the celestial realm was also depicted visually, in images like the one in the January 1965 issue of the journal The Borderguard, in which Dzerzhinsky’s face hovers in the clouds.²⁸

The exceptionally long time which Dzerzhinsky had spent in prisons and exile before the revolution furnished the cult with a huge store of material for his vita – passion stories, heroic feats, trials, and acts of sacrifice.²⁹ In one of the most frequently quoted stories, during one of his numerous prison terms, Dzerzhinsky, despite being gravely ill himself, performed the feat of carrying on his back his ailing cell-mate, who was unable to walk, out into the prison courtyard each day for months on end.³⁰

Dzerzhinsky also resembled a saint by virtue of his celebrated sensitivity and gentleness, exemplified by his fondness for flowers and for nature more generally, and his appreciation of poetry. Central to the Dzerzhinsky cult is the notion that he would not hurt a fly; one memoir, for example, describes how he ‘would bend down and pluck flowers, and I noticed how carefully he placed his feet, clad in heavy boots, so as not to trample the beautiful plants or an ant-hill’.³¹ He displayed such qualities from childhood, when he acted as the protector of mistreated animals.³² In general, ‘love’ was said to be a primary force motivating Dzerzhinsky.³³

Most important in this connection was Dzerzhinsky’s renowned passionate love for children, expressed most famously through his actions in the sphere of child welfare in the early 1920s.³⁴ This was easily the single most important and marketable, palatable facet of the Soviet cult of Dzerzhinsky. This was the cult’s pride; its showpiece; a ‘bright, unforgettable page from the history of Soviet chekists’.³⁵ It was in thi...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• A Note on Transliteration and Translation
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Soviet Chekism
• Dzerzhinsky's Commandments
• Late Soviet Chekism The Changing Face of Repression Under Khrushchev and Beyond
• Screening the Historical Chekist
• Screening the Contemporary Chekist
• Post-Soviet Chekism
• Introduction
• Re-Inventing Chekist Traditions
• The Cult of Andropov
• Securitizing the Russian Soul
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index