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FELIKS DZIERZYNSKI AND THE SOCIAL DEMOCRACY OF THE KINGDOM OF POLAND AND LITHUANIA
Abstract
Feliks Dzierzynski has been accorded his place in history primarily by virtue of the role he played as head of the secret police in the first decade of Soviet rule in Russia. Apart from Lenin, and perhaps Trotsky and Stalin, few wielded as much power in this initial period of Soviet history as Dzierzynski.(' ) Before his emergence on the Russian scene during the 1917(, )revolution, however, Dzierzynski had already attained a reputation, above all among agents of the tsarist Okhrana, as the inspirational leader of the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL), a revolutionary Marxist party with a mass base which operated in the Russian partitition of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Deriving both fame and authority from his tireless activity, fanatical devotion to the party and three daring escapes from Siberian exile, he, more than any other figure, shaped the organizational structure of the SDKPiL as the key participant in its collective leadership. Whereas Rose Luxemburg was recognized by her contemporaries as the "brains" of Polish Social Democracy, Feliks Dzierzynski was its acknowledged "soul." This work seeks to bridge the gap between the lack of attentionin Western scholarship to Dzierzynski's career before 1917 and the(' )legend-building efforts on his behalf by generations of communisthistorians. In its examination of Dzierzynski's activity in "Russian"(' )Poland, this treatise therefore has a twofold purpose: first, toilluminate the early, important chapters of Dzierzynski's life in order(' )to come to grips with him as an historical personality rather than thesemi-mythological creature of communist inspiration; second, toshed new light on the day-to-day operations of the SDKPiL partyorganization itself, so closely connected to Dzierzynski's own(' )activity, through the use of unpublished and previously unexaminedsources from Polish party archives. Only then is it possible todetermine Dzierzynski's role in the historical development of Polish(' )communism as well as the ideological, political and personal baggage he later took with him as he embarked on a new career in the first socialist state.
Subject Area
European history
Recommended Citation
BLOBAUM, ROBERT EDWARD, "FELIKS DZIERZYNSKI AND THE SOCIAL DEMOCRACY OF THE KINGDOM OF POLAND AND LITHUANIA" (1981). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI8127152.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI8127152