Thread by @CosmonautMag

Underrated Bolshevik: Felix Dzerzhinsky.
The Iron Felix often gets a bad wrap as head of the Soviet police state apparatus which would become a defining feature of the USSR, but further consideration reveals this Soviet founding father to be a deeply sensitive humanist. Thread..

Felix was born in Belarus (then Russian Empire) from a Polish family. He would grow to become close friends with fellow Polish revolutionary social-democrat turned communist, Rosa Luxemburg. He kept a portrait of her in his office until he died.

Felix was tasked with the bloody job of protecting the revolution within a state of near continuous war and chaos. This called for radical measures of Red Terror. Remember, these were hard men all of who had spent time in prison, Felix included. Richard Deacon states:...

..."He was ruthless, cold, clear-headed, gifted with organisational talents and insisted from the start that he must have full powers and not be subject to any supervision." Such was the regard Lenin had for the man that he was given these powers without reservation."

We mustn't romanticize the violence Felix oversaw. He certainly did not.
V. Serge: "I know for a fact that Dzerzhinsky judged them to be "half-rotten", and saw no solution to the evil except in shooting the worst Chekists and abolishing the death-penalty as quickly as possible."

Despite such radical measures, once the Civil War was over were generally condemned by Dzerzhinsky who advocated for civil peace. He led the fight against typhus in 1918, was chair of the Commissariat for Internal Affairs, initiated a vast orphanage construction program.

Felix quickly became a leader within the inappropriately-named Communist "Right", supporting the worker-peasant alliance, slow steady industrialization, and the NEP. Had it not been for his death (1926), he likely would've joined Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky.
Cohen's "Bukharin"

As head of VSNKh he was conciliatory and open to working with non-party specialists like his "highly-esteemed Menshevik" friends.

Book: Naum Jasny, "Soviet Economists"
Image of Dzerzhinsky with Premiere of the Soviet Union and "Right" Oppositionist Alexei Rykov.

In @sunraysunray 's article "The Few Who Won" Sunkara points out both Dzerzhinsky's genuine humanistic socialism as well as his complicity in excesses which would mark Soviet development with the NEP's end and Stalin's "All out drive" to industrialization/collectivization.

Felix teaches us two things. 1) As Labour loses England, Morales is subject to a ruthless brutal coup, Lula is jailed, the attempted Vz coup, and the global right rises, we must never underestimate the savagery of capitalism. Endless coups and failures show us this regularly.

Revolution is not pretty and the enemies of progress are many. Felix was tasked with his bloody and brutal job however precisely because he did not relish in the violence. It was not an enjoyment or fetish, but an austere task for survival.

This leads us to 2) Felix believed in civil peace, Lenin's NEP, the smychka, and the steady, stable development into socialism. Though blood birthed the socialist revolution, it would not birth socialism itself. Felix understood this and thusly,..

... he supported the programme of comparative "liberalism" (as opposed to War Communism) as a developmental framework for the transition to socialism. He also fought against the endless bureaucracy which would become a major feature of Soviet life.

Going on, we would do well to remember both the sacrifices AND the openness, faith in human progress, critical eye to dysfunction and degeneration, and the commitment to civil peace and non-coercion once the socialist order is established.