"Black Pope"

Vladimir Ilich Lenin bathed, personally, in blood as seldom as he could. When it became necessary to sign death warrants by the thousands and eventually by the tens of thousands, that task was passed on to Felix E. Dzerzhinsky, a Pole, the son of a little almost-bourgeois nobleman, the man whom Russian emigres christened in sheer terror, "The Black Pope of Bolshevism." Last week he died in Moscow (of overwork) at 49.

He might have died from the same cause at any time in the last 20 years. Something froze Dzerzhinsky's soul in his youth-- perhaps too early and too long imprisonment--and he became imbued with the prodigious soulless energy of a machine. While imprisoned in Poland and later in Siberia, he begged permission, lest inaction drive him mad, to empty daily all his fellow prisoners' latrines. Like a famished tiger, he thirsted for the revolutionary works of Marx, but (naturally) his gaolers were adamant on that point, though obliging in the matter of latrines. . . .

Dzerzhinsky, starved of Bolshevist theory, self-goaded to half-mad labors, became, when the Red Revolution set him free, the most practical, most tireless, most in- corruptible henchman of Lenin.

He organized the dread Communist "Cheka," or "Extraordinary Commission," an agency of suppression, destruction and terror, an agency of superb, fiendish efficiency. While the Tsarol police had favored the living death of Siberia for their victims, Dzerzhinsky, merciful perhaps, signed death warrants literally by the bale. "There is no god but the Cheka, and Dzerzhinsky is its pope!" became a black byword in the years 1919 to 1922.

At last, softspoken, pale, bloodless, Felix Dzerzhinsky found that he had bled the enemies of Bolshevism whiter than his own prison-bleached forehead. He became convinced that the "Cheka" was no longer needed, saw to it that several of his incurably bloodthirsty agents were quietly murdered, "for the ultimate good and safety of the state," and focused his own sleepless energies on the economic problems of Soviet government.

He became People's Commissar (Minister) for Transport and later president of the Supreme Economic Council, a post which he held at the time of his death. To Dzerzhinsky--in the opinion of virtually all foreign correspondents at Moscow--belongs almost the sole credit for having inculcated a spirit kindred to "efficiency" into sluggard Soviet industry. Working in sympathy with Trotzsky--also "a practical man"--he has striven literally day and night to combat the visionary, theoretical Marxism which is the chief curse of the Soviets.

When Death came to Felix Dzerzhinsky he was in the midst of a campaign to reorganize and educate industrially the whole body of Soviet workers (TIME, July 19). Perhaps only he possessed the granite will and the steel-trap tenacity requisite for. this titan's task. Than his death, no heavier loss to economic Russia can be imagined.

Funeral. Mme. Dzerzhinsky, pale, slender, 35, stood by her husband's bier with their son, 15, while the body lay in state for 24 hours in Trade Union House, Moscow. Though exhausted, she retained strength to follow the coffin to Red Square, where it was interred not far from the black marble tomb of Lenin.

A huge crowd* milled about in seeming indifference. Whiffs of smoke ascended from many pipes. Occasional sporadic laughter was heard as jokes were loosed. Felix Dzerzhinsky, respected, feared, was never popular.

*Present were Leon Trotzky, Mary Pickford Fairbanks, D. Fairbanks.