āOur enemies have developed legends about the all-seeing eyes of the Cheka, about its all-hearing ears, about the omnipresent Dzerzhinski. They have pictured the Cheka as a sort of vast army, spread over the whole country, holding in firm grasp, and even reaching out its tentacles right into their own camp. They have not understood wherein Dzerzhinskiās strength consisted.
In the first place, Dzerzhinskiās strength was of the same nature as the strength of the Bolshevik Party itself-it consisted in having the full confidence of the working masses and poorest peasants, in their confidence that Dzerzhinski was their own flaming sword, their own watchful eye. Every worker, every poor peasant, considered it his duty to help the Cheka in its great struggle to defend the revolution. The Cheka did not consist only of the brave Chekists. The Cheka was a multi-millioned working-class body watching, reporting every movement of the enemy. ...
The second source of Dzerzhinskiās strength, as well as of the Cheka, was the determinedness of their actions, which was born of their iron conviction in the moral rightness of the proletarian revolution. In the summer of 1918 Dzerzhinski gave an interview to the representatives of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois newspapers which were still in existence. They asked if he was not prepared to admit that the Cheka might sometimes make mistakes and commit acts of injustice in individual cases. Dzerzhinski answered; āThe Cheka is not a court. The Cheka is the defence of the revolution, as the Red Army is. And just as in the civil war the Red Army cannot stop to ask whether or not it may harm individuals, but is obliged to act with the one thought of securing the victory of the revolution over the bourgeoisie, the Cheka is obliged to defend the revolution and conquer the enemy, even if its sword by chance does sometimes fall upon the heads of the innocent.ā For Dzerzhinski the safety of the revolution was the supreme law, and so he could find in his heart that unshakable rigour without which a victorious struggle against counter-revolution would have been quite impossible.āĀ
