Felix Dzerzhinsky was the Bolshevik revolutionary who founded the Soviet secret police, becoming the architect of the system of state terror that would define the Soviet regime. Born into a Polish gentry family in the Russian Empire, he became a committed Marxist as a youth and spent much of his early life in tsarist prisons and Siberian exile for his revolutionary activity.
After the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, Lenin entrusted Dzerzhinsky with the defense of the new regime against its enemies. In December 1917 he established the Cheka — the Extraordinary Commission to combat counter-revolution and sabotage — and led it with single-minded ruthlessness. During the Russian Civil War the Cheka conducted the "Red Terror," carrying out mass arrests, summary executions, and the first Soviet labor camps to crush all opposition.
Ascetic, fanatical, and incorruptible in his personal life — he was known as "Iron Felix" — Dzerzhinsky believed terror to be a necessary instrument of revolution.
He continued to head the secret police as it was renamed the GPU, and in his later years also directed efforts to revive Soviet industry and transport. He died suddenly in 1926 after delivering an impassioned speech. The institution he created evolved into the OGPU, NKVD, and ultimately the KGB, and his statue stood outside its Moscow headquarters until it was toppled in 1991.