Dzerzhinsky Returned: What Connects the FSB Academy Renaming and the Demolition of Soviet Repression Memorials

On 22 April 2026, Putin signed a decree assigning the Academy of the Federal Security Service (FSB) the name “F.E. Dzerzhinsky,” citing his “outstanding contribution to ensuring state security.” Felix Dzerzhinsky was the founding head of the Cheka, the precursor to the Committee for State Security (KGB) and today’s Russian security services.

Putin himself graduated from the KGB Higher School—the predecessor of the FSB Academy—in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when it still bore Dzerzhinsky’s name.

Three days before Putin’s decree, residents of Tomsk, a City in Siberia, woke up to find that the Stone of Sorrow—a memorial to victims of Soviet repression—had disappeared overnight. Stones commemorating repressed Poles, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Kalmyks were also removed. Local authorities demolished the Memorial Square for Victims of Political Repression, which had been established in 1989 on the site of the inner courtyard of a former Soviet secret police prison.[2]

These two developments are not isolated events. They reflect a deeper and longstanding pathology in post-Soviet Russia: the failure of de-Chekisation—masked by largely symbolic de-Stalinisation—which is now evolving into a renewed embrace of totalitarian repressive practices.

Whitewashing Dzerzhinsky: Post-Stalin Rehabilitation of the Security Services

Felix Dzerzhinsky is known for his call for “organised terror” and as a mastermind of the Red Terror, which claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution.[3] Yet compared to Stalin’s Great Purge, the Red Terror remains less publicly scrutinised in Russia. Contemporary Russian elites—many of them former or active security officers, or Chekists—continue to venerate Dzerzhinsky. Why?

Khrushchev launched de-Stalinisation, yet this process paradoxically paved the way for the rehabilitation of the security services.

The first failure occurred in the post-Stalin era. In the 1950s, Nikita Khrushchev launched de-Stalinisation, yet this process paradoxically paved the way for the rehabilitation of the security services. The crimes of Chekists who executed the Great Purge were not systematically investigated. Instead, a narrative emerged portraying the newly-created KGB as fundamentally distinct from the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD), Stalin’s instrument of repression.[4] Khrushchev argued that the majority of Chekists were honest and trustworthy, blaming only a handful of officers corrupted by Stalin’s cult of personality.[5]

More strikingly, it was claimed that the tragedy of the Great Purge stemmed from the security organs’ loss of the ‘true’ Chekist traditions of the Dzerzhinsky era. The proposed remedy was not reform, but revival.[6]

At the 22^nd Party Congress in 1961, Stalin’s body was removed from Lenin’s Mausoleum on Red Square and cities bearing his name were renamed. By contrast, in the same decade, a statue of Dzerzhinsky was erected in front of the KGB headquarters on Lubyanka Square. Numerous streets and squares across the Soviet Union were named after him.

Cheka Propaganda during Perestroika

The second failure came during perestroika and glasnost. While civic movements demanded the rehabilitation of victims of repression and the opening of KGB archives, the Soviet security service sought to dissociate itself from the Stalin-era Great Purge. The KGB leadership insisted that the KGB had nothing in common with the “repressive organisation” of the NKVD, arguing that Stalin’s apparatus “destroyed almost all the comrades-in-arms and associates of F.E. Dzerzhinsky and forgot the Leninist principles of the Cheka.” In the late 1980s, numerous events and publications were organised by the KGB to delink itself from Stalin’s NKVD, with Chekists frequently recast as victims of Stalinist repression.[7]

While civic movements demanded the rehabilitation of victims of repression the Soviet security service sought to dissociate itself from the Stalin-era Great Purge.

In several cities, Chekists attempted to co-opt Memorial, a civil society organisation advocating the rehabilitation of victims of Soviet repression. For example, in Tomsk, as KGB operative Major Valery Uimanov wrote in a top-secret KGB journal in 1991, the Tomsk Regional Branch of Memorial initially demanded the immediate identification of burial sites of victims and the publication of lists of NKVD employees and informants. In response, the KGB Tomsk Directorate “developed and carried out measures aimed at intercepting the initiative and preempting events,” with Chekists proactively participating in searches for burial sites and erecting memorial stones. In an effort to “shift the society ‘Memorial’ from a total rejection of the past and present to a more realistic beginning,” the KGB co-organised a round table with Memorial. Archival materials were selectively declassified for “propaganda purposes,” helping to neutralise accusations of total secrecy surrounding KGB archives.[8]

Lieutenant Colonel Yu. A. Petrukhin, the chief of the Tomsk KGB Tenth Group (responsible for archives), was even elected to the board of Memorial. Uimanov noted that Petrukhin’s credibility among the less confrontational members of Memorial enabled the KGB to influence the organisation from within.[9]

During the opening of the Memorial Square for Victims of Political Repression in Tomsk in 1989 (recently demolished), Petrukhin—speaking as a member of Memorial—repeated the KGB talking points: leadership positions in the NKVD had been filled with “individuals of low moral and political qualities—careerists,” who eliminated “devoted Chekists, followers of Dzerzhinsky.”[10]

The initiative to compile the first-ever Book of Remembrance dedicated to the victims of repression originated with Petrukhin, with approval from within the KGB. Chekist historians, such as Petrukhin and Uimanov, participated in the compilation, drawing on their exclusive access to KGB archives. As Uimanov wrote, thanks to these active measures, “Memorial’s actions did not appear so convincing.”[11] The KGB subsequently recommended that other regional offices follow the Tomsk example.[12]

In a 1990 survey, Dzerzhinsky ranked second (41%)—after Lenin (64%)— as the revolutionary figure with whom respondents felt sympathy. Stalin, only 7%.

The impact of years of Chekist informational work—distinct from Communist Party propaganda—was tangible. In a 1990 survey, Dzerzhinsky ranked second (41%)—after Lenin (64%)— as the revolutionary figure with whom respondents felt sympathy. Stalin, by contrast, was viewed positively by only 7%. Fully 51% of respondents considered the creation of the Cheka in 1917 and its broad powers “necessary.”[13] Thus, hundreds of streets and other toponyms bearing Dzerzhinsky’s name remained across Russia and in some former Soviet republics.

Failed De-Chekization

Viktor Chebrikov, KGB chairman during glasnost, praised Dzerzhinsky as a man who had wholeheartedly sought to “eliminate injustice and crime from the world” and “embrace all mankind with [his] love, to warm it and cleanse it of the dirt of modern life.” His successor, Vladimir Kryuchkov, repeated Dzerzhinsky’s famous formula: Chekists must have “a cool head, a warm heart, and clean hands.”[14]

Chekists rarely acknowledge that these words belonged to a man who institutionalised terror. Among the students infused with this ethos at the KGB Higher School was Vladimir Putin. For him, there appears to be no contradiction between systemic violence and moralistic self-legitimation.

Even after the failed August 1991 coup and the removal of Dzerzhinsky’s statue from Lubyanka Square, his busts remained inside the successor agencies of the KGB, and rituals of reverence continued.[15]

In 1993, during a meeting with US officials, Vadim Kirpichenko, an adviser to the director of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), Yevgeny Primakov, insisted that Russian intelligence services had been thoroughly reformed and now operated under the rule of law. Present at the meeting, American scholar Michael Waller posed a pointed question: why did the service celebrate 20 December 1992—the 72^nd anniversary of the Cheka’s Foreign Department—rather than the first anniversary of the newly reconstituted intelligence service? Kirpichenko reacted irritably, calling Dzerzhinsky a “great man” and listing his achievements. December 20 remains celebrated annually as the “Day of Chekist.”[16]

The Chekists’ triumph came when Putin ascended to the presidency in 2000, ushering in intensified prosecutions of opposition leaders and independent journalists.[17]

The USSR succeeded in de-Stalinisation but failed in de-Chekisation.

As Waller aptly described, the USSR succeeded in de-Stalinisation but failed in de-Chekisation.

Historical Memory Supervised by Chekists

After Russia’s full-scale invasion, in September 2023, a new Dzerzhinsky statue was unveiled—not on Lubyanka Square in front of the FSB, but at the SVR headquarters in the suburbs of Moscow. At the ceremony, SVR director Sergei Naryshkin described Dzerzhinsky’s phrase “a cool head, a warm heart and clean hands” as a moral compass for contemporary Chekists, praising him as faithful to “a future based on goodwill and justice.”[18]

In November 2024, Moscow’s Gulag History Museum was closed, officially citing fire safety violations. In March 2025, Vasily Khanevich, one of the founders of the Museum of the NKVD Investigation Prison in Tomsk—located next to the recently demolished Memorial Square—was forced to submit a letter of resignation. The circumstances surrounding his dismissal remain unclear, but since 2019, Khanevich’s museum has been supervised by Valery Uimanov, Deputy Director for Work with Memorial Heritage at the Tomsk Regional Museum of Local History and a retired FSB colonel—the same Chekist who sought to neutralise Tomsk Memorial during perestroika.[19]

In November 2024, at a conference held at the Tomsk Legislative Duma, Uimanov criticised what he described as western “Russophobia” and “fascist” tendencies, calling for intensified patriotic education of children about the “Great Patriotic War” and for the erection of memorials honouring heroes of the “Special Military Operation.” The Chekist historian argued that Russia’s historical memory had long been under attack by the west through various foundations and grant programmes, and that everything “Soviet” was being deliberately erased from public consciousness. According to Uimanov, the west had implanted the “worm” of nationalism in former Soviet republics in order to support “colour revolutions” and ultimately destroy Russia.[20] These narratives reflect a characteristic Chekist worldview that conflates domestic pluralism with external subversion.

The wholesale rejection of Soviet political repression is less a revival of Stalinism than a reaffirmation of Chekism.

Uimanov further criticised Russian school textbooks for including excerpts from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, claiming that the book contains “much that does not correspond to reality.” The wholesale rejection of Soviet political repression—manifested in the closure of repression memorials—is less a revival of Stalinism than a reaffirmation of Chekism.

Return to Totalitarian Practice

Putin’s 22 April decree also acknowledges the FSB Academy’s achievements in “professional training of personnel” for the FSB. This symbolic elevation comes despite a series of major security failures: the collapse of the FSB-led blitzkrieg against Ukraine in February 2022; Prigozhin’s rebellion in June 2023; the Crocus concert hall terrorist attack in March 2024; Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk in August 2024; and the destruction of dozens of strategic bombers as a result of Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb in June 2025. Chekists remain untouchable as Putin’s primary instrument for maintaining political stability in wartime Russia.[21]

At the same time, the FSB’s powers have expanded significantly. The service has gained authority to access non-state databases without court orders, suspend telecommunications and internet services, and approve international scientific cooperation projects. The FSB’s military counterintelligence department has been used to purge senior military officials after Sergei Shoigu’s departure from the Defence Ministry. Furthermore, the FSB has officially regained control of pretrial detention facilities, including the notorious Lefortovo Prison.

The restoration of Dzerzhinsky’s name to the FSB Academy signals both ideological continuity and a practical return to Chekist-style totalitarian repression.

For the Kremlin, there is now little need for rhetorical distance from the Chekist legacy. The restoration of Dzerzhinsky’s name to the FSB Academy is not mere symbolic nostalgia. It signals both ideological continuity and a practical return to Chekist-style totalitarian repression. Whether Dzerzhinsky will return to his former pedestal on Lubyanka Square may be less a question of ‘if’ than ‘when’.[22]

[1] “Putin Returns ‘Iron Felix’ Dzerzhinsky to Russia’s Spy School,” Reuters, April 24, 2026.

[2] “Russian Authorities Remove Monument to Estonian Victims of Soviet Deportations,” ERR, April 21, 2026.

[3] Michael J. Waller, Secret Empire: The KGB in Russia Today (Westview Press, 1994), 20–21.

[4] Waller, Secret Empire, 53.

[5] Amy Knight, The KGB: Police and Politics in the Soviet Union, Revised (Unwin Hyman, 1990), 52–54.

[6] Julie Fedor, Russia and the Cult of State Security: The Chekist Tradition, From Lenin to Putin (Routledge, 2011), 45–46.

[7] Sanshiro Hosaka, “The KGB and Glasnost: A Contradiction in Terms?,” Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization 31, no. 1 (2022): 77–78.

[8] Hosaka, “The KGB and Glasnost: A Contradiction in Terms?,” 79–80; В. Уйманов, “КГБ-“Мемориал”: практика взаимодействия [KGB-“Memorial”: interaction practices],” Сборник КГБ СССР, no. 156 (1991): 18–20.

[9] Hosaka, “The KGB and Glasnost: A Contradiction in Terms?,” 79–80; Уйманов, “КГБ-“Мемориал”: практика взаимодействия [KGB-“Memorial”: interaction practices].”

[10] “Эти скорбные и светлые минуты…” [These sorrowful and bright minutes…] in “Ночные бульдозеры [Night bulldozers],” Новая газета, April 22, 2026.

[11] Уйманов, “КГБ-“Мемориал”: практика взаимодействия [KGB-“Memorial”: interaction practices].”

[12] Valeriy N. Uymanov, “Дольше Всего Живет Память. . . (к 25-Летию Выхода Книги Памяти Репрессированных Жителей Томской Области ‘Боль Людская’) [The Longest Living Memory… (For the 25-Th Anniversary of the Release of the Book the Memory of the Repressed Residents of the Tomsk Region ‘The Pain Human’],” Vestnik Tomskogo Gosudarstvennogo Universiteta. Istoriya, no. 52 (April 2018): 136–41.

[13] Waller, Secret Empire, 30.

[14] Waller, Secret Empire, 30.

[15] Waller, Secret Empire, 30–31.

[16] Waller, Secret Empire, 33.

[17] Sanshiro Hosaka, “Unfinished Business: 1991 as the End of the CPSU but Not of the KGB,” Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization 30, no. 4 (2023): 449–51.

[18] “Памятник Дзержинскому открыли в штаб-квартире Службы внешней разведки [A monument to Dzerzhinsky was unveiled at the headquarters of the Foreign Intelligence Service],” Служба внешней разведки Российской Федерации, September 11, 2023. This may have been a gesture of renewed loyalty after Naryshkin’s conspicuous hesitation during the televised Security Council meeting three days before the full-scale invasion, when he appeared to diverge from Putin’s position on how to handle Ukraine.

[19] “В Томске уволен один из основателей Мемориального музея [One of the founders of the Memorial Museum in Tomsk has been fired],” Ural’skii Memorial Ekaterinburg, March 1, 2025.

[20] Валерий Уйманов, “О Преемственности Поколений и Сохранении Исторической Памяти [On the Continuity of Generations and the Preservation of Historical Memory],” Парламентские встречи на тему «80-летие Великой Победы: память, духовный опыт и ответственность поколений», 2024.

[21] Sanshiro Hosaka, Putin’s Counterintelligence State: The FSB’s Penetration of State and Society and Its Implications for Post-24 February Russia (International Centre for Defence and Security / Estonian Foreign Policy Institute, 2022).

[22] In 2021, Moscow authorities tested public opinion by proposing the reinstallation of a monument on Lubyanka Square, offering a choice between Felix Dzerzhinsky and Prince Alexander Nevsky. “В Москве у штаб-квартиры СВР открыли памятник Феликсу Дзержинскому [A monument to Felix Dzerzhinsky was unveiled near the SVR headquarters in Moscow],” Radio Svoboda, September 11, 2023.