This is the last article you can read this month
You can read more article this month
You can read more articles this month
Sorry your limit is up for this month
Reset on:
Please help support the Morning Star by subscribing here
MOSCOW electoral officials yesterday approved a referendum on returning the statue of Bolshevik revolutionary and Cheka director Felix Dzerzhinsky to its original site.
The statue of “Iron Felix” was removed from its pedestal in front of the KGB (now FSB) headquarters in Moscow’s Lubyanka Square during the 1991 counter-revolution.
It has since stood in the city’s Museon Park alongside statues of Vladimir Lenin and other revolutionary heroes.
On Wednesday the Moscow City Duma allowed the Communist Party to start collecting the nearly 150,000 signatures needed to hold a September referendum.
The Moscow Election Commission, which initially vowed to block the vote, made a U-turn yesterday and registered a group that would collect signatures.
Dzerzinsky was director of the Cheka, a forerunner of the KGB, from 1922 until his death in 1926. He prosecuted agents who abused their powers and successfully argued for the abolition of the death penalty for political prisoners towards the end of the Russian civil war.
