Felix Dzerzhinsky short biography and interesting facts

Dzerzhinsky Felix Edmundovich a brief biography and interesting facts from the life of the Soviet revolutionary, statesman and first chairman of the Cheka are set out in this article.

Felix Dzerzhinsky short biography

Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky was born on September 11, 1877 in a family estate in the Minsk province in a Polish religious noble family. Childhood passed in a family estate near Vilnius. He wanted to be a priest, but his uncle dissuaded the young man from this venture.

Dzerzhinsky for the first time in 1884 became acquainted with the ideology of Marxism and joined the circle of social democrats of the Vilnius gymnasium (where he studied). A year later, he drops out and devotes himself to revolutionary work.

For as long as 20 years, Felix Edmundovich’s life was "full" of arrests, prison, exile, escapes. He was sentenced to death several times. In 1906, a revolutionary leader illegally attended the next congress of the RSDLP, where he met Lenin.

During the February Revolution of 1917, Dzerzhinsky was imprisoned in Moscow Butyrka prison, but was soon released. In August of the same year, he was admitted to the Central Committee of the RSDLP (b) and the All-Russian Revolutionary Committee, and Felix Edmundovich was preparing an armed insurrection. In the subsequent October Revolution, the revolutionary took an active part.

December 17, 1917 he was appointed chairman of the Cheka. Together with Lenin, he was the initiator of the expulsion abroad and persecution of the Russian intelligentsia, the execution of clergy and the seizure of church values.

At the beginning of the 1920s, he headed the People’s Commissariat of Railways and became chairman of the Commission on Combating Homelessness.

The death of Felix Dzerzhinsky overtook July 20, 1926, when the Central Committee plenum was on. The cause of death is a heart attack. He grabbed it when a politician made an emotional report on the economic condition of the country for 2 hours.

Felix Dzerzhinsky interesting facts

• The revolutionary went down in history as the “Iron Felix”. Why Dzerzhinsky Iron Felix? Contemporaries recall that Dzerzhinsky was sitting and working in his office, while the terrorists threw a bomb out the window. Felix Edmundovich was not at a loss and quickly hid behind an iron cabinet. At the sound of the explosion, the companions flew into the office and saw that the room was full of smoke, it was all black. And Dzerzhinsky came out of the closet, healthy and clean, as if nothing had happened. After this event, the associates began to call him the Iron Phoenix.
• Margarita Nikolaeva was the first love of Felix Dzerzhinsky. They corresponded for a long time, until 1899. Then he became interested in the revolutionary Yulia Goldman. These relations were also short-lived: Julia suffered from tuberculosis and died in Switzerland in 1904. In 1910, the revolutionary fell in love once again, Sofia Mushkat took possession of his heart. The lovers even got married a few months later. But here he was not lucky. His wife was arrested in 1911. While in prison, she gave birth to a son, Jan. After giving birth, Sofia was sentenced to exile in Siberia until the end of her life, depriving her of her fortune and all rights. In 1912, she fled abroad using fake documents. Spouses could meet only after 6 years.
• Dzerzhinsky at a young age accidentally killed his sister Wanda, shooting her from a hunting rifle.
• He studied very poorly at school: he spent 2 years in the first grade.
• On his initiative in 1923, the now famous Dynamo Sports Club was created.