page_title: Felix Dzerzhinsky
section_title: Political affiliations and arrests
hierarchical_section_title: Felix Dzerzhinsky / Political affiliations and arrests
caption_attribution_description: Русский: Ф. Э. Дзержинский и С. С. Дзержинская с сыном Яном в Лугано (Швейцария)
context_page_description: Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, nicknamed "Iron Felix", was a Bolshevik revolutionary and official. Born into Polish nobility, from 1917 until his death in 1926 Dzerzhinsky led the first two Soviet state-security organizations, the Cheka and the OGPU, establishing a secret police for the post-revolutionary Soviet regime. He was one of the architects of the Red Terror
  and Decossackization.
context_section_description: Two months before he expected to graduate, the gymnasium expelled Dzerzhinsky for "revolutionary activity" and for posting signs with communist slogans at the school. He had joined a  Marxist group, the Union of Workers (Socjaldemokracja Królestwa Polskiego "SDKP"), in 1895. In late April 1896 he was one of 15 delegates at the first congress of the  Lithuanian Social Democratic Party (LSDP). In 1897 he attended the second congress of the LSDP, where it rejected independence in favor of national autonomy. On 18 March 1897 he was sent to Kaunas to take advantage of the arrest of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) branch. He worked in a book-binding factory and set up an illegal press. As an organizer of a shoemakers' strike, Dzerzhinsky was arrested for "criminal agitation among the Kaunas workers"; the police files from this time state: "Felix Dzerzhinsky, considering his views, convictions and personal character, will be very dangerous in the future, capable of any crime." Dzerzhinsky envisioned merging the LSDP with the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) and was a follower of Rosa Luxemburg on a national issue.
  He was arrested on a denunciation for his revolutionary activities for the first time in 1897, after which he served almost a year in the Kaunas prison. In 1898 Dzerzhinsky was exiled for three years to the Vyatka Governorate (city of Nolinsk) where he worked at a local tobacco factory. There Dzerzhinsky was arrested for agitating for revolutionary activities and was sent 500 versts (330 mi) north to the village of Kaigorod. In August 1899 he returned to Wilno. Dzerzhinsky subsequently became one of the founders of Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (Polish: Socjaldemokracja Królestwa Polskiego i Litwy, SDKPiL) in 1899. In February 1900 he was arrested again and served his time at first in the  Alexander Citadel in Warsaw and later at the Siedlce prison. In 1902 Dzerzhinsky was sent deep into Siberia for the next five years to the remote town of Vilyuysk, while en route being temporarily held at the Alexandrovsk Transitional Prison near Irkutsk. While in exile he escaped on a boat and later emigrated from the country. He traveled to Berlin, where at the SDKPiL conference Dzerzhinsky was elected a secretary of its party committee abroad (Polish: Komitet Zagraniczny, KZ) and met with several prominent leaders of the Polish Social Democratic movement, including Rosa Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches. They gained control of the party organization through the creation of a committee called the Komitet Zagraniczny (KZ), which dealt with the party's foreign relations. As secretary of the KZ, Dzerzhinsky was able to dominate the SDKPiL. In Berlin, he organized publication of the newspaper Czerwony Sztandar ("Red Banner"), and transportation of illegal literature from Kraków into Congress Poland. Being a delegate to the IV Congress of SDKPiL in 1903 Dzerzhinsky was elected as a member of its General Board.
  Dzerzhinsky visited Switzerland, where his fiancée Julia Goldman, the sister of Boris Gorev, was undergoing treatment for tuberculosis. She died in his arms on 4 June 1904. Her illness and death depressed him - in letters to his sister, Dzerzhinsky explained that he no longer saw any meaning for his life. That changed with the Russian Revolution of 1905, as Dzerzhinsky became involved with work again. After the revolution failed he was again jailed in July 1905, this time by the Okhrana. In October he was released on amnesty. As a delegate to the 4th Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in Stockholm, Dzerzhinsky entered the central body of the party. From July through September 1906, he lived in Saint Petersburg and then returned to Warsaw, where he was arrested again in December of the same year. In June 1907 Dzerzhinsky was released on bail. At the 5th Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, in London in May-June 1907, he was elected in absentia as a member of the  Central Committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party. In April 1908 Dzerzhinsky was arr
caption: Dzerzhinsky pictured with wife Zofia and son Janek in Lugano (Switzerland) in October 1918
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