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Something Borrowed. If Russia lacked "a form of social order" before the revolution, what was the case after Lenin completed his handiwork? He destroyed Russia's institutions and tried to impose a form of society of which 99 Russians out of 100 had never heard, which had not been tried anywhere, and for which Russia was called unfit by the very men who had invented this idea of society. If Czarism needed an Okhrana, clearly the Bolshevist state would need a super-Okhrana to fill the larger social vacuum.
The man Lenin picked as first policeman of the proletarian revolution was borrowed from the Polish aristocracy. When Felix Dzerzhinsky was made head of the Bolshevists' CHEKA, he wrote to his wife: "I am now in the front line and I want to be merciless, to tear the enemy to pieces as a watchdog would do."
Dzerzhinsky yearned to correct the faults of his fellow man. One of the first people he corrected was the head of the Revolutionary Military Committee for Combating Alcoholism & Banditry, who wandered into Dzerzhinsky's office one night, drunk. Dzerzhinsky had him shot.
Once, at a meeting of political commissars, Lenin passed a note to Dzerzhinsky "How many vicious counter-revolutionaries are there in our prisons?" Dzeizhinsky's scribbled reply was: "Abou: fifteen hundred." Lenin nodded, made a cross on the note, and returned it to Dzerzhinsky. That night, on Dzerzhinsky's order, all 1,500 were shot. It turned out to be a mistake. As Lenin's secretary explained later: "Vladimir Ilyich usually puts a cross on a memorandum to indicate he has noted the contents."
Dzerzhinsky approved and did his best to carry out the directive of Grigory Zinoviev, then chairman of the Comintern: "If out of 100,000,000 population, 10,000,000 do not want to obey the Soviets, they have to be destroyed physically." Nobody will ever know how many hundreds of thousands were killed by Dzerzhinsky's CHEKA.
One day, at a Politburo meeting, he contradicted Stalin on a minor matter. The Leader suddenly (and for the first time on such an occasion) let go with several frightening Georgian curses. Dzerzhinsky suffered an apoplectic stroke and died. The Soviet press always refers to him as "Fearless Knight of the Revolution."
Something Blue. Dzerzhinsky was succeeded by another aristocrat, Vyacheslav Rudolfovich Menzhinsky. Before the revolution Menzhinsky wrote a prophecy: "If Lenin ever reaches power in fact, and not in imagination, he will make a mess of it, the like of one made by Czar Paul I. ... Leninists are a clan of political gypsies, with a strong voice and a love for wielding the knout, imagining that it is their inherent right to serve as coachmen for the laboring masses."
After the revolution, Prophet Menzhinsky became the Leninists' knout. Lenin called him "the decadent neurotic." This policeman was interested in Persian art and higher mathematics. He wrote erotic poetry and read pornographic novels in his office between executions. He was plump, languid, soft-voiced, given to blue moods. He said: "Our task is to bring culture to the masses at a terrific speed." His OGPU, successor to the CHEKA,' brought death by execution and starvation to millions of Ukrainian and other peasants.