Felix Dzerzhinsky

Born in 1877 to Polish nobility in Russian Poland, Dzerzhinsky turned revolutionary young, joined the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, and spent years bouncing between arrests and Siberian exile, escaping every time while studying the methods of the Okhrana he was dodging. Imprisoned after a final arrest in 1912, he sat in a cell until the February Revolution freed him in 1917; he joined Lenin's Bolsheviks and helped carry the October Revolution through. That December, Lenin handed him the newly formed Cheka with orders to crush counter-revolution, and the civil war that followed saw Dzerzhinsky expand it into the machinery of the Red Terror - mass arrests, detentions, executions. The Cheka became the GPU in 1922, then the OGPU in 1923, Dzerzhinsky at the head of all three, while also running the Supreme Soviet of the National Economy from 1924. He died of a heart attack in 1926 and was buried in the Kremlin Wall, remembered by Soviet security agents as a revolutionary saint and by everyone else as the architect of state repression.