Dzerzhinsky gets a spanky new statue!

[Chris Doss <lookoverhere1@xxxxxxxxx>]

Wow, first the monument to Andropov, then Brezhnev,
now this.

Russians honour secret police founder with statue

MOSCOW, Sept 11 (Reuters) - Russians unveiled a statue
of Felix
Dzerzhinsky
on Saturday to mark the 127th birthday of the founder
of the first
Soviet
secret police force, the forerunner of the KGB.

A previous statue of "Iron Felix" stood outside KGB
headquarters in
Moscow
but was removed in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet
Union, which used
secret police to eliminate dissent for over 70 years.

The inauguration of the new statue in Dzerzhinsky, a
town near Moscow
named
after the revolutionary, comes as the effectiveness of
the post-Soviet
security services has been called into question as
never before.

Many Russians blame them for being powerless to
prevent this month's
seizure of 1,000 hostages in a school in Beslan in
southern Russia.

But many older Russians still hanker for the stability
of the Soviet
years,
and say that the Beslan massacre -- and many other
attacks blamed on
Chechen separatists -- could never have happened in
the old days.

Around 300 people attended the statue's unveiling,
including school
children and officials, Ekho Moskvy radio said.




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