Putin rehabiliterer Lenins bøddel

Felix Dzerzhinsky var stifteren av Sovjetstatens hemmelige politi, Tsjekaen, senere KGB og FSB, og dermed Lenins og senere Stalins sjefsbøddel og slavedriver, og ingeniør bak fangeleirene - GULAG. Det er derfor ikke så merkelig at en annen KGB-offiser, Vladimir Putin, nå rehabiliterer ham, etter at stadig mer av håpet om en liberal rettsstat knuses i Russland. Alan Johnson skriver om dette i bloggen til World Affairs:

"In September President Vladimir Putin restored the title “Dzerzhinsky Division” to an elite Moscow police unit. So what, you say? Well, that’s the point. As the novelist Martin Amis put it in Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, “Everybody knows of Himmler and Eichmann. Nobody knows of Yezhov and Dzerzhinsky.” (...)

As early as February 1919, Dzerzhinsky was keen for the new labor camps to re-educate “those gentleman who live without any occupations” and “those working in Soviet institutions who demonstrate unconscientious attitudes to work.” He oversaw the “first camp of the Gulag,” the Solovetsky, where, according to Anne Applebaum’s magisterial Gulag: A History, “the OGPU [the reorganized Cheka] first learned how to use slave labor for profit.” Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelagorecords how brutal (and corrupt, despite the myth) Dzerzhinsky’s Cheka was. “He didn’t shirk from dirty work,” as Stalin put it."