Felix Dzerzhinsky Statue in Lubyanka Square

The Felix Dzerzhinsky Statue in Lubyanka Square is toppled during the upheaval that brings the Soviet political order toward its end. Standing in the square before the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the Soviet State Security Committee, the monument is presented not as an isolated piece of sculpture but as a visible emblem of power whose removal marks a break in the public landscape.

Setting and Political Association

The statue stands on the square in front of the Lubyanka, identified in the narrative as the headquarters of the Soviet State Security Committee. That setting gives its fall particular force: the monument is removed from a place closely associated with state security, making the change visible at the very center of the old system’s authority. The account does not describe the statue’s appearance or the mechanics of its removal; its significance lies in where it stood and what happens to it.

The Toppling and the Changing Emblems

The statue is toppled immediately after Mikhail Gorbachev signs the measure described in the preceding passage. The narrative then records another visible substitution: the red flag gives way to the tricolor of the 1917 provisional government. The sequence sets the removal of the monument alongside a change of flag, turning political transformation into a series of alterations to the symbols displayed in public space. The new flag reaches back to an earlier Russian political moment rather than simply replacing one emblem with an unrelated one.

From Public Rupture to Dissolution

A few months later, the narrative moves from the statue’s fall to the secret meeting at a hunting lodge in Belovezhskaya Forest, where Boris Yeltsin, Leonid Kravchuk, and Stanislav Shushkevich agree that their republics can dissolve the Soviet Union. They drink heavily in the sauna; Yeltsin becomes so drunk that the other two have to carry him to bed. Before losing consciousness, he phones George Bush (senior) to announce that the Soviet Union no longer exists. The juxtaposition gives the statue’s removal a place in a larger progression: first the old authority’s monument disappears from the square, and then the union itself is declared dissolved.

A Symbolic Fall Without a Clean Ending

The statue’s toppling supplies a decisive image of rupture, but the book’s later attention to Soviet power and its legacies complicates any sense that the past has simply vanished. It describes Eduard Limonov’s imprisonment at Lefortovo, characterized as a KGB fortress, and the reverence his imprisonment earns among young National Bolshevik Party followers. Their admiration for his endurance and their readiness to risk prison for their ideas show that the fall of a public monument does not settle how the Soviet past is remembered or repurposed. The statue marks the collapse of an old symbol; the later scenes trace the persistence of political memory in new forms.