[2] Construction of the monument began in July 1958, with the statue sculpted by Yevgeny Vuchetich, and the overall design by Grigory Zakharov [ru].

The monument was opened to the public in 1958, outside the Lubyanka Building, which housed the headquarters of the Soviet security services, the OGPU, NKVD (responsible for the bloodletting of the Stalin purges of the thirties),[3] NKGB, MGB and KGB.

On the evening of 22 August 1991, shortly after the failure of the coup attempt undertaken by the State Emergency Committee, thousands of people began to gather around the KGB building on Lubyanka Square, seeking to topple Dzerzhinsky's statue, seeing it as a symbol of the brutal Soviet past.

People sprayed the words "executioner", “antichrist”, “Felix is finished,” and the symbol of the Russian Orthodox Church on the pedestal.

Finally the monument was reerected on September 11, 2023, but this time in front of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service headquarters outside Moscow.