MEM.LETT.POLI.1917.9'.DZER
translation by John Gibbons, Foreign Publishing House, Moscow 1959 The Russian Text was compiled and prepared for the press by Dzerzinsky's widow.
* 1877, † 1926
Charge: Critical Political Writings
Prison: Warsaw Citadel, Poland (Map)
http://www.xnumber.com/xnumber/pic_felix.htm
Dzerzhinsky was a Polish Communist revolutionary, famous as the founder of the Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka. The agency became notorious for large-scale human rights abuses, including torture and mass summary executions, carried out during the Red Terror and the Russian Civil War.
Dzerzhinsky was born into a Polish szlachta family of the Samson coat of arms in the Dziarzhynava estate near Ivianets and Rakau in Western Belarus, then part of the Russian Empire. He was expelled from school in Vilnius for "revolutionary activity". He joined a Marxist group—the Lithuanian Social Democratic Party in 1895, and was one of the founders of Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania in 1900. He spent the major part of his early life in various prisons. He was arrested for his revolutionary activities in 1897 and 1900, sent to Siberia, and escaped both times. He then went to Berlin, before returning to participate in the failed 1905 revolution, after which he was again jailed, this time by the Okhrana. After being released in 1912, he was quickly rearrested for revolutionary activity and jailed in Moscow.
In March, 1917, he was released (although Pravda usually asserts that he escaped, and indeed the facts are uncertain), along with many others, from the jail he had been imprisoned in since 1912 . His first act was to join the Bolshevik Party. His honest and incorruptible character, combined with his complete devotion to the cause, gained him swift recognition and the nickname "Iron Felix".