12 February 2014

Source: HRO.org (info)

• Moscow city & Moscow region Human rights defenders

International Memorial Society has voiced strong opposition to the idea of returning the statue of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet punitive organs (the Cheka), to Lubyanka Square.

"It’s a very bad idea", the historian and head of Memorial Arseny Roginsky told Interfax.

A commission of Moscow City Duma plans to review the possibility of returning the statue of F. Dzerzhinsky to Lubyaka Square for the eighth time.

The initiative to restore the statue and return it to its former place has been put forward by private individuals.

“This idea bears no relation to our contemporary realities or with the goal of creating a State governed by the rule of law,” Roginsky said.

"But I can say that Feliks Dzerzhinsky was a person who always followed the path of what was known as ‘revolutionary legality,’ and not what is understood as the bases of law.

This was someone who was a leading exponent of the practice of hostage taking.

Dzerzhinsky promoted the idea of creating extra-judicial bodies that could use simplified procedures to review cases in absentia. On the conscience of this person are many serious actions that has nothingto do with the ideals written into our Constitution,” Roginsky said.

Earlier Roginsky proposed restoring to the Lubyanka the fountain that had been there almost 100 years before the statue to ‘Iron Feliks’ was put up.

The monument to F. Dzerzhinsky on the Lubyanka was taken down I 1991 immediately after the collapse of the failed Communist-inspired coup of August that year.

A year earlier, still in Soviet times, Memorial had initiated the setting up on Lubyanka Square near the Polytechnical Museum of the Solovetsky Stone in memory of the victims of political repression in the USSR.