Not so in this world, though: Vladimir Putin, a longtime KGB officer in the Soviet era and a former head of the Federal Security Service (FSB), its main domestic successor, has been president or prime minister since 1999. The infamous statue of Feliks Dzerzhinsky bites the dust in Moscow in August 1991. In some parallel universe, the KGB might be a source of shame to the Russian government today, part of a Soviet past not forgotten but studied as a fount of information about how to avoid a repeat of repression. The Soviet Union ceased to exist four months later, and with it the KGB - the latest in a line of secret police agencies stretching back to 1917 and the All-Russia Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counterrevolution and Sabotage, which was known as the Cheka and was led by Dzerzhinsky. The other was the removal of the statue of 'Iron Feliks' Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Bolshevik secret police, from the square that bore his name outside the headquarters of the KGB - a towering and unmistakable symbol of the Soviet state's power over the people.Īfter a crowd of citizens celebrating the coup's collapse tried to tear down the 15-ton statue, a city crane arrived and pulled Dzerzhinsky off his pedestal. Boris Yeltsin (far left) standing atop an armored vehicle during the heady days of August 1991.
