WHEN they toppled Felix Dzerzhinsky’s statue in front of the KGB’s headquarters in 1991, it was one of the defining moments of the Soviet Union’s collapse.

But 14 years later, another monument to the widely reviled founder of the Soviet secret police has been erected outside Moscow’s police headquarters.

Moscow police say that the bronze bust of “Iron Felix” was placed on a 2.5m (8ft) stone pedestal this week to mark National Police Day yesterday.

Yevgeni Gildeyev, a police spokesman, said that it had been done at the request of police veterans who admired Mr Dzerzhinsky for having taken care of orphans and street children.

Human rights activists and liberal politicians, however, expressed outrage that city authorities were paying tribute to a man blamed by many for millions of executions after the Bolshevik Revolution.

“When such sculptures are restored, it means that Russia is turning away from the democratic path and is returning to the old system — the Soviet, communist, totalitarian system . . . where the Government’s role is valued above all,” Nikita Belykh, leader of the liberal Union of Right Forces party, told the Kommersant newspaper. Mr Dzerzhinsky helped to establish the first Soviet secret police, known as the Cheka, after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.

He oversaw a wave of mass arrests and executions in the next few years, arguing that “organised terror” was necessary if the revolution was to succeed.

About half a million people were executed between 1917 and 1923 and the secret police, later renamed the KGB, went on to claim the lives of up to 30 million people under Joseph Stalin.

Lyudmila Alexeyeva, a leading human rights activist, said that the statue was the latest sign that the Kremlin was reverting to the symbols — and some of the practices — of the Soviet Union.

Vladimir Putin, the Russian President and a former KGB officer, has already readopted the Soviet national anthem — albeit with different words — and resurrected the red banner and the five-pointed red star as the symbols of the Russian Army.

Since taking office in 2000, he has also promoted several former KGB officers to the Kremlin, reimposed state control of national television channels and abolished direct elections for regional governorships.

Western leaders, already concerned about these moves, were stunned this year when Mr Putin described the Soviet Union’s collapse as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”.

Kremlin officials say that they are simply responding to widespread nostalgia for the stability of Soviet times among many Russians, especially the elderly, who suffered so much during the chaos of the 1990s.

A recent poll by the All-Russian Public Opinion Research Centre found that 20 per cent of respondents described Stalin’s role in Russian history as “very positive” and 30 per cent called it “somewhat positive”.

Critics, however, accuse the Kremlin of using the image of people such as Stalin and Dzerzhinsky to intimidate potential critics and boost the prestige of the KGB’s successor, the Federal Security Service.

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