Putin’s continuing effort to reconcile very discordant aspects of Russia’s history into one unified, supposedly patriotic ‘symphony’ marches on. On some days he rummages through the imperial past, on others, well, the Moscow Times reports:

President Vladimir Putin signed a decree restoring the title “Dzerzhinsky Division” to an elite police unit that was previously named after the founder of the Bolshevik secret police, the Interior Ministry’s internal troops press service said Monday.
Felix Dzerzhinsky founded the Cheka, a security apparatus notorious for orchestrating mass summary executions during the Russian Civil War and the Red Terror. Established in 1924, the unit bore his name from 1926 until 1994, when its name was changed to the Independent Operational Purpose Division, the press service said. The Dzerzhinsky Division ensured security at the Potsdam Conference of 1945 and the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics. It was also dispatched to the restive regions of Nagorno-Karabakh, North Ossetia and Chechnya upon the demise of the Soviet Union.

‘Iron Felix’, a Pole of (vaguely) noble descent, was one of the worst of the monsters given his chance by the October Revolution. He was ascetic, highly intelligent, and a true believer (interestingly, in his youth he had contemplated becoming a Jesuit priest) with the soul of an inquisitor. And, of course, he was the architect of “organized terror…the terrorization, arrests and extermination of enemies of the revolution on the basis of their class affiliation or of their pre-revolutionary roles,” a “ devout knight of the proletariat” (to borrow Stalin’s admiring description) who recruited “solid, hard men without pity” to do his butcher’s work. And so they did.

Now, imagine for a moment the reaction if Angela Merkel chose to name an elite German police division after, say, Himmler or Heydrich…