It has been 11 years since the bronze statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the NKVD and the KGB precursor Cheka, last glowered down upon Lubyanskaya Pl.

The statue was torn down in front of a cheering crowd – an image that became almost as symbolic as the collapse of the Berlin Wall. However, if Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov has his way, employees working in the FSB headquarters will soon gaze out upon their hero's sculpted figure.

As justification for reinstating this monument to the Red Terror's architect – as a target for public veneration, not opprobrium – Luzhkov cites, along with the esthetic merits of the statue, Dzerzhinsky's good works with homeless children and his rescue of the railroad system, dismissing the mass deaths that he sanctioned as "excesses."

Well, Iron Felix may well have been a boon for homeless waifs, and got the trains running on time, but that is not what he is remembered for. Hitler's regime laid the foundations for a phenomenal highway system still in use to this day, but no one suggests that Germany erect a statue to the Father of the Autobahn. Dzerzhinsky's place in history is first and foremost as founder of an organization that, in a later incarnation, was to become responsible for a reign of terror that gripped the Soviet Union – an orgy of state killing whose bloodthirstiness was rivaled only by its pointlessness.

As if to underscore the contradiction between Luzhkov's words and reality, the Memorial human rights organization announced that it had discovered the location, near St. Petersburg, of possibly the largest mass grave of Stalin-era victims ever found in Russia – clogged with the remains of people shot, execution-style, in the back of the head.

Admittedly, Dzerzhinsky cannot be directly held responsible for the horrific slaughters of that era – he died in 1926 – but the fact is that the organization he founded carried them out, and his own predilection for bloody-handed ruthlessness set a precedent that rationalized and justified them.

"He is the shame of Russia," Alexander Yakovlev said of Dzerzhinsky, and it is true. Dzerzhinsky and the ruthless, ends-justify-the-means mentality he embodied represent the Original Sin of the Soviet Union, and its police-camp mentality. A monument to him does not honor the sacrifice and heroism of a secret service bravely defending its motherland, as some might like to think. It is, instead, paying tribute to the callousness of people whose rhetorical sympathy with the poor and oppressed ended the moment the latter took issue with their plans, as the casual murder of many peasants showed all too clearly. There are many things in Russian history worthy of memorials. The Cheka is not one of them.

As Luzhkov talks up the merits of a man whose name is synonymous with state terror and police repression, Memorial has another idea for a monument that would certainly be more fitting. At the site of the recently discovered mass grave near St. Petersburg – which is just one of many – it plans to erect a monument to the people who were so brutally murdered by the heirs of Dzerzhinsky. It is the memory of the victims of the secret police, after all, that really deserves to be honored – not that of their victimizer, however fine a job at railways reorganization he may have carried out.

Russia's president is a former member of the KGB and the FSB, and the role played by the secret services in politics and the economy has been increasing rapidly.

This is not necessarily a bad thing – the secret services are, after all, commonly thought to be among the most professional, least corrupt divisions of the government (that's not saying much, of course). However, history is history, and the past of Russia's secret services has not been a pretty one by just about any standard. We can all understand the desire to revere national heroes and those who made a positive contribution to the state.

Iron Felix is by no means one of them.