Death
Dzerzhinsky died of heart failure on 20 July 1926 in Moscow, immediately after a two-hour long speech to the Bolshevik Central Committee during which, visibly quite ill, he violently denounced the United Opposition directed by Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, and Lev Kamenev. Upon hearing of his death Joseph Stalin eulogized Dzerzhinsky as "...a devout knight of the proletariat." Nicholas Roerich and his son George were waiting in the Cheka office to see Dzerzhinsky when they heard of Dzerzhinsky's death. Dzerzhinsky was succeeded as head of the Cheka by fellow ethnic Pole Vyacheslav Menzhinsky.
Dzierżyńszczyzna, one of the two Polish Autonomous Districts in the Soviet Union, was named to commemorate Dzerzhinsky. Located in Belarus, near Minsk and close to the Soviet-Polish border of the time, it was created on 15 March 1932, with the capital at Dzyarzhynsk (Dzerzhynsk, formerly known as Kojdanów). The district was disbanded in 1935 at the onset of the Great Purge and most of its administration was executed.
His name and image were used widely throughout the KGB and the Soviet Union—and other socialist countries: there were six towns named after him. The town Kojdanava, which is not very far from the estate, was renamed to Dzyarzhynsk. In Russia there is a city of Dzerzhinsk, a village of Dzerzhinsk and three other cities called Dzerzhinskiy; in former Soviet republics, there are cities named Dzerzhinski (Armenia), Dzyarzhynsk (Belarus), and Dzerzhinsk (Ukraine). A Ukrainian village in the Zhytomyr Oblast was also named Dzerzhinsk until 2005 when it was renamed Romaniv. The Dzerzhinskiy Tractor Works in Stalingrad were named in his honor and became a scene of bitter fighting during the Second World War. The FED camera, produced from 1934 to 1990, is named for him. There is a museum dedicated to him in his birthplace in Belarus.
Read more about this topic: Felix Dzerzhinsky
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than Death or Night;
To defy Power, which seems Omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope, till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change nor falter nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan! is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire and Victory.”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
“In taking out an insurance policy one pays for it in dollars and cents, always at liberty to discontinue payments. If, however, woman’s premium is a husband, she pays for it with her name, her privacy, her self-respect, her very life, “until death doth part.””
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“We achieve “active” mastery over illness and death by delegating all responsibility for their management to physicians, and by exiling the sick and the dying to hospitals. But hospitals serve the convenience of staff not patients: we cannot be properly ill in a hospital, nor die in one decently; we can do so only among those who love and value us. The result is the institutionalized dehumanization of the ill, characteristic of our age.”
—Thomas Szasz (b. 1920)