By Olha Chepil | 2026-05-15

Felix Dzerzhinsky built the machine that killed hundreds of thousands. He founded the secret police apparatus that launched the Red Terror: mass arrests, extrajudicial executions, systematic repression. For decades, his 11-ton bronze monument on Lubyanka Square lorded over Soviet state security headquarters -- the defining image of a state that ruled by fear.

In 1991, crowds tore it down. The toppling became one of the most iconic images of the Soviet collapse.

Now he's back.

In April 2026, President Vladimir Putin signed a decree restoring the name "Felix Dzerzhinsky" to the Federal Security Service (FSB) Academy -- the flagship training institution of Russia's security services. The academy is where Putin himself studied in 1979 and the early 1980s, when it was still known as the KGB Higher School and still bore Dzerzhinsky's name. The academy carried that name from 1962 to 1992.

"It was the first public event that made it clear: the Soviet Union was over," said Alfad Galimov, a retired lieutenant colonel who studied at the Military Academy in Moscow and passed the Lubyanka monument often.

"Dzerzhinsky was the primary instrument of all Soviet atrocities. Now, they are rolling back history. It is a sign that they are returning to the old totalitarian system, with this 'Dzerzhinsky school' serving as its primary tool," Galimov told Kontur.

The Chekists' revanche

Lawyer and human rights activist Nikolai Polozov calls it a power grab by what he describes as the "Chekist corporation" -- a security elite tracing its lineage from the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission (VChK), the Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU), and the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), represented today by the FSB.

"In the Soviet era, the Chekists were always under party control; they couldn't conduct policy independently. Now, their time has come. This is the FSB's revanche," Polozov told Kontur.

He argues that today's security structures dictate both policy and the historical narrative and that the goal is social submission.

"They are training Russians in learned helplessness: that nothing can be done without a 'strong hand,' and that the only good thing in history was the Chekists, who saved Russia time and again," he said.

The renaming tracks with a concrete expansion of FSB authority. The service has gained the power to access non-state databases without court orders, suspend telecommunications and internet services, and approve international scientific cooperation projects. Its military counterintelligence department has been used to purge senior military officials following Sergei Shoigu's removal from the Defense Ministry. The FSB has also officially regained control of pretrial detention facilities, including the notorious Lefortovo Prison.

Dmitry Dubrovsky, a professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences at Charles University in Prague, sees a deeper contradiction the Kremlin makes no effort to conceal. Putin routinely condemns revolution as catastrophe -- yet simultaneously glorifies Dzerzhinsky, a revolutionary who helped dismantle the Russian Empire.

"They are perfectly capable of singing praises to the late Tsar, crossing themselves, and keeping a bust of Dzerzhinsky on their desks," Dubrovsky told Kontur. "Paradoxically, Dzerzhinsky remains the symbol of the 'ideal Chekist' for them -- one with a burning heart and cold hands."

Analysts frame the decree not as a signal of future repression, but as confirmation that repression is already the norm.

"They are establishing a new normalcy," Dubrovsky said.

Erasing memory

The FSB Academy renaming is one piece of a broader pattern. New monuments and busts of Stalin have appeared across Russia. In 2025, authorities restored a Soviet high-relief sculpture featuring his image at Moscow's Taganskaya metro station.

"Why Stalin, specifically? It is a demonstration of the 'strong hand.' The state is crafting an image of Putin as a powerful ruler, using Stalin as the blueprint," Polozov said.

The rehabilitation of Soviet repressive symbols is running alongside the erasure of their victims' memory. Three days before Putin signed the decree, residents of Tomsk woke up to find the Stone of Sorrow, a memorial to victims of Soviet repression, had disappeared overnight. Authorities removed additional memorial markers and dismantled a monument to repression victims in Moscow's Muzeon Park. Official explanations cite construction and technical constraints.

Plans are also underway to rename the Museum of the History of the Gulag the "Museum of Memory," reframing it around Nazi wartime crimes rather than Soviet state terror. The effect is a deliberate pivot: the lens shifts from internal repression to an external enemy.

"We are seeing the deliberate destruction of symbols and the rewriting of history -- now that the state has destroyed the human rights community that once preserved this memory," Polozov said.

A society that cannot push back

Analysts say the timing is not accidental. The segment of Russian society capable of organized dissent has been arrested, exiled, or forced underground. Memorial, the human rights organization that preserved much of this historical record, was liquidated by Russian courts in 2021.

"The segment of society capable of objecting has been destroyed, exiled, imprisoned, or driven underground," Polozov said. "We could return the monument to Lubyanka Square tomorrow, and what would they do?"

Russian schools have rewritten textbooks. Children no longer learn about the 1939 Soviet-German Pact -- discussing it is now treated as a criminal act. The war in Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea are taught exclusively through state propaganda.

"The Russian authorities are poisoning the future for generations who will live within this distorted cultural space for the next 20 to 40 years," Polozov said.

Dzerzhinsky is returning to Russian institutions not as a historical figure, but as an archetype. For some, the Lubyanka statue question is already settled in spirit.