Russians vote on returning secret police chief’s statue

MOSCOW: Three decades after Russians toppled the statue of Soviet secret police founder Felix Dzerzhinsky, they are voting on whether to restore it outside of the domestic intelligence headquarters in central Moscow.

The week-long vote kicked off on Thursday over a new monument to stand in front of the headquarters of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor agency to the KGB, on Moscow’s Lubyanka Square, a stone’s throw from the Kremlin.

Muscovites are choosing between Dzerzhinsky, who is seen as a symbol of the KGB’s excesses in the Soviet Union, and Alexander Nevsky, a 13th-century prince and Orthodox saint. By 1230 GMT Thursday more than 100,000 votes had been cast on the Moscow government portal, with Nevsky edging Dzerzhinsky by 51 percent to 49 percent.

“I would like to see Dzerzhinsky as he is a more iconic historical figure and he had a huge impact on the history of Russia,” Valentin Belikov, a student, told AFP. Marina Protasova, a historian, said she would rather see a fountain restored on the square that the original Dzerzhinsky statue replaced when it was erected in the 1950s.

She said Dzerzhinsky was seen as a symbol of the KGB and “there were many good things about him, as well as questionable and bad.” “He’s a controversial figure,” she told AFP. The vote comes at a time when nostalgia for Soviet leaders like Joseph Stalin is on the rise, while young Russians are increasingly unaware of USSR-era repression.