That evening, in the warm Moscow night, the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky swayed on its base.
We were on August 21, 1991, on Lubyanka Square, right in front of the gray and feared building of the Soviet political police.
The putsch launched against Gorbachev by the hardliners of the Communist Party was in the process of aborting, after three days of face-to-face with the people of Moscow grouped around Boris Yeltsin, who had brought together the democratic camp.
Three to four thousand demonstrators surrounded the sculpture of the founder of the Cheka, a hated symbol of the crimes of communism, shouting “
Down with the criminal regime
”.
It was a moment of euphoria and dizziness after seventy years of communist totalitarianism which had claimed tens of millions of victims.
After a few hours, a crane was sent to the site to dismantle the iron giant.
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On the walls of the KGB building in the bowels of which so many thousands of tortured innocents had perished, a few demonstrators...
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