Bust of Soviet secret police founder Dzerzhinsky installed at children’s camp in Russia

A United Russia deputy on the Nizhny Tagil city council has unveiled a bust of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder and first head of the Cheka, at a settlement outside the city. Dmitry Kostennikov, who initiated the monument’s installation, announced the unveiling in a post on social media.

The bust stands on the grounds of a former children’s health camp called Chayka, which Kostennikov purchased in 2023 and is converting into a sports and patriotic camp called Pervyy (“First”), the Russian news outlet Vechernie Vedomosti reported. The settlement is Chernoistochinskaya, outside Nizhny Tagil.

A great-grandnephew of Dzerzhinsky named Vladimir attended the unveiling ceremony.

Vechernie Vedomosti also noted that in early March, three streets in the same settlement had their pre-revolutionary names restored: Kommunisticheskaya Street became Klyuchevskaya again, Sverdlova became Andreyevskaya, and Udarnaya became Tulskaya. The push to restore the old names came from Archimandrite Germogen (Yeremeyev), a native of Chernoistochinskaya and rector of the Church of Serafim Sarovsky in Yekaterinburg.

Felix Dzerzhinsky was the founder and head of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission (Cheka), whose successors became the NKVD, KGB, and FSB. Dzerzhinsky was the organizer of the Red Terror that began after the 1917 revolution.

In April 2026, Vladimir Putin restored the name “after F. E. Dzerzhinsky” to the FSB Academy. Journalist Mikhail Zygar, in his column in Der Spiegel, wrote that a statue of Dzerzhinsky is planned to be returned to Lubyanka Square in Moscow. According to his sources, the political decision on this has already been made.

The statue of Dzerzhinsky, toppled from its plinth on Lubyanka Square in 1991, has spent many years in Moscow’s Muzeon park. In 2021, Moscow authorities held a vote in the Active Citizen app on the question of returning the Dzerzhinsky statue to Lubyanka. As an alternative, a statue of Alexander Nevsky was proposed for the center of the square. In the end, the vote was halted by order of Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, who stated that “public opinion was split roughly in half” and that monuments should unite, not divide, society.