Oct 7
AP/Interfax – Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka today opened a memorial museum complex to Feliks Dzerzhinskii, and praised the founder of the Soviet secret police as a “great person” Belarus could use now.
Lukashenka also called for strong ties between Belarusian and Russian intelligence agencies, citing parallels in their common past and current cooperation.
Lukashenka said at the ceremony in Dzerzhinovo, Dzerzhinskii’s native village 30 kilometers east of Minsk, that Belarus is currently going through a “very difficult period,” which he said is similar to the time when Dzerzhinskii founded what he called a “mighty organization.”
Dzerzhinskii helped establish the first Soviet secret service, called the Cheka, in 1917 under Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. The Cheka, which was the forerunner of the KGB, was involved in a number of mass arrests and executions.
There’s a story, probably apocryphal that when de Gaulle visited Poland back in the sixties he was being led around Warsaw by a Politburo member They were discussing the degree to which Poland was controlled by the Soviet Union. The good comrade pointed out to de Gaulle that there were no statuse of Lenin in the city – only two in the country. De Gaulle countered by reminding his host of the huge statue of Dzerzhinsky smack in the center of the city. Ah, yes, replied the comrade – we are happy to honor Dzierzynski, the Pole who killed the most Russians.
Dzierzynski’s Cheka had killed untold numbers of Russians (and others) but he was, after all, a Polish nobleman from … Lithuania. During his lifetime the population of this part of ‘Lithuania’ was a mixtue of Poles, Jews and Belarussians. But it was known as Lower Lithuania because it had been part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania which in turn had formed the Polish Commonwealth together with ‘Poland’ (including much of the Ukraine) until the Commonwealth was partitioned among its neighbours in the late eighteenth century. The Grand Duchy’s ruling nobility had been Lithuanian but by then was mostly assimilated as Poles, strangely its official administrative language was an ancient form Belarussian. Middle Lithuania was the predominantly Polish rural/Jewish urban area around Vilnius/Wilno and, together with Lower Lithuania was part of interwar Poland. Upper Lithunia the ethnic Lithuanian region that most of which ended up as the Lithuanian state between the wars (a small sliver of it ended up as part of Poland). Now it is in Belarus – Bialorus in Polish meaning ‘White Rus’ or ‘White Ukraine’, Rus being the ancient kingdom that was the cradle of the Russian state but was centered in what is now Ukraine.