Moscow Stories: Nostalgia for discipline

Both the founder of the KGB and our own Iron Lady are back in fashion. Mary Dejevsky detects a longing for the age of 'order'

The Weakest Link is on TV, complete with black-clad Russian dominatrix. The news on a rival channel reports the latest drive-by shooting – of a Moscow company director, "presumably because of his business activities", says the presenter wearily.

But the Moscow of old is never far away: a snowstorm rages outside, they are playing "Yesterday" in the hotel bar, and who should be the topic of conversation, but Feliks Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret police?

Until that moment, I might have qualified Dzerzhinsky as "the feared" or "hated", without so much as a second thought. But it is hard to be so certain any more. For the argument galvanising Moscow is about whether Dzerzhinsky's statue should be returned to the place where it stood for so many years, right in front of the forbidding KGB headquarters – and, by extension, whether a new Dzerzhinsky is needed today.

Eleven years and seven weeks ago, bystanders cheered and whistled as a clapped-out Soviet lorry drew up to the statue late at night, winched it from its plinth and carted it away. The pictures from that night, during the three-day coup that spelt the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union, entered the end-of-communism archives, along with the opening of the Berlin Wall, the jubilation in Prague's Wenceslas Square, and the shooting of the Ceausescus in Romania.

But there was always something dissonant about the felling of Dzerzhinsky. Although it was presented as a heroic act of "the people", it was actually pre-emptive salvage on the part of the Moscow city authorities, who worried that the statue could become the focus for East European-style unrest, and decided to remove it first.

Some months after the Communist flag finally came down, Dzerzhinsky was found, along with other post-Soviet "non-people", lying face down in a ditch in a Moscow park. For the last year or so, though – tall, stern and right side up again – the former KGB chief has been a star attraction in a new central "sculpture" park, where he stands in the company of other has-beens, such as Leonid Brezhnev and Konstantin Chernenko. Curiously, the statues have supposedly been displayed for their sculptural as much as their historic significance, and the name of the sculptor is as prominently marked as that of the person depicted.

Now, the mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, has supported a proposal initiated by the city's lingering Communists to reinstate Dzerzhinsky in front of the Lubyanka. The move has caused apoplexy among many people who are otherwise positively disposed towards the mayor.

Former dissidents and reformists call it an insult to the memory of all the KGB's victims. They have a modest memorial in a small garden square not far away. The problem is that the site of Dzerzhinsky's statue, which has remained empty all these years, sorely needs an imposing sculpture. And a constituency exists – as it has done during every period of untidy reform in Russia – for a strong disciplinarian who will "restore order".

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Margaret Thatcher's star may have faded in her homeland, but she would be heartened to learn that in Moscow she is an abiding inspiration to leaders of the city's new capitalist class.

At meetings last week, no fewer than three leading "oligarchs" – Yuri Deripaska, who has made his fortune in aluminium, Peter Aven, a former minister turned banker, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, head of the oil conglomerate Yukos – cited the example of the Iron Lady when recounting the factors that had made them what they are. They highlighted her "vision", her "conviction", her reforms in Britain and her "absolute certainty that what she was doing was right".

All of which prompts a thought about that vacant site in front of the Lubyanka. Isn't there an unwanted statue of the lady with the handbag languishing in London?