MOSCOW, December 4. /TASS/. Leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation [CPRF], Gennady Zyuganov, has asked President Vladimir Putin to return the monument to the founder of Cheka Bolshevist secret police, Felix Dzerzhinsky, to its original place in the center of Moscow’s Lubyanka Square right in front of the headquarters of the former Cheka and now the Federal Security Service [FSB].
The CPRF published Zyuganov’s letter to Putin at its homepage on Monday.
Zyuganov recalled that December 20 would mark the centenary anniversary since the setting up of Cheka, officially known as the All-Russia High Commission for Struggle with Counterrevolution and Sabotage.
"This organization became the first one in the Cheka-OGPU-KGB-FSB system of state security, which remains to this day one of the crucial elements of Russia’s state system," the letter said.
"Dzerzhinsky’s postulation that a Cheka operative must have clean hands, a fiery heart and a cool head continues to set a moral standard for all the law enforcement agencies today," he said.
Also, Zyuganov believes Dzerzhinsky was one of the most efficient economic managers in Russia. "Opinion polls show he still is one of the most respected politicians of the 20th century for increasingly many Russians," the address said.
"In the light of what we have mentioned here, we [Communists] hereby submit a proposal to re-establish the monument to Dzerzhinsky on Moscow’s downtown," the document said. "A comeback of the monument to a man who came to epitomize dignity and selflessness, will help foster the worthy moral guidelines in our society."
Soviet authorities unveiled the monument to Dzerzhinsky surrounded by an island-like flowerbed in 1958. After the abortive coup d’etat in 1991 it was pulled down. It has been kept ever since then in the Museon park along with numerous other sculptures of and monuments to personalities of the Soviet era.
In 2015 the CPRF initiated a referendum for the return of the monument to its original place. It obtained authorizations for the campaign and began the gathering of signatures in support of the presupposed objective of the polling.
Party officials said later they had gathered the required number of signatures and the party eventually refrained from submitting them to the city’ election commission.