(AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)
During the Soviet times, the head of its feared secret police (which underwent so many different name changes, the most enduring being KGB) occupies a third floor office in Lubyanka Building overlooking the large statue of Feliks Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky. Dzerzhinsky was the founder of the feared Cheka, Lenin’s secret police, which specialized in state terror and was the forerunner of the Soviet KGB. Dzerzhinsky was there at Lenin’s side when the Bolsheviks, then a minority party, took control of the February revolution, and was also there as a pallbearer at Lenin’s funeral.
On August 18th 1991, hardliners in the Communist Party demanded the resignation of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. When he refused, they held him prisoner at his summer dacha and declared his resignation due to ‘ill health’. The next day, tanks rolled into Moscow to protect the Russian Parliament. In the end, the hardliners failed to win over the military and the KGB and the coup fell apart within three days.
Most of the Western photographers in Moscow were on their August vacation and the events were recorded by two AP photographers, Olga Shalygin and Alexander Zemlianichenko, who won the Pulitzers for AP the next year. On the night of 23/24 August, Zemlianichenko documented the statue of the Iron Felix being toppled by a cheering crowd. As with many Soviet monuments, it was so well constructed that it could not be simply torn down – it took five heavy-duty cranes to lift it and topple it. The statue that came to symbolize the terror committed in the name of the revolutionary cause was one of the most reviled symbols of Soviet rule, and its toppling end of an era.
Iconic Photos 
Talk about “state terror”. The early Soviet state was up against a whole world of enemies; imperial countries that intervened in Russia to aid the Tsar’s white army in their attempt to slaughter the masses and restore their monarchic order. They, the tsarists, had the record in jew elimination before the nazis, they killed workers on the spot, plus they made a wide use of agents to infiltrate the bolshevik ranks. That’s why the Cheka was founded. Not to instill terror against dissidents, which more and more became the case as the regime transformed into the bureaucratic caste it was under Stalin and onwards.
And the bolsheviks didn’t “take control” of the February revolution, they simply supported the movement, and took part in it, but didn’t have a major position within it before after July 1917.
[…] you are a thug.” I couldn’t resist responding with a photo of the historic 1991 takedown of “Iron Felix,” the Soviet secret police founder Felix Dzerzhinsky, in Moscow, and asking if the label would […]