MOSCOW - In 1991, in an age intoxicated with newly won freedoms, enthusiastic crowds toppled the towering statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the ruthless founder of the Soviet secret police, from its pedestal in front of the KGB headquarters on Lubyanka Square. But now, the 15-ton metal monument is the subject of a struggle between increasingly ardent admirers.

Russia's new leaders, anticipating next year's parliamentary elections, are wrangling over who can best honor and protect the statue and thereby profit from Russians' increasingly fond memories of their Soviet past.

Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, a one-time reformer who helped banish Dzerzhinsky's effigy to an out-of-the-way park, proposed returning it to the bustling Lubyanka Square two months ago. But the move was blocked by critics, especially intellectuals and the powerful Russian Orthodox Church, whose priests Dzerzhinsky persecuted and killed.

"Dzerzhinsky is a Red executioner," Nobel Prize-winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn told the newspaper Izvestia. "Restoration of his monument would be an outrage upon millions of those who had perished in camps."

Now Andrei Razin, a Soviet-era pop star, has proposed that if Moscow's mayor won't return the statue to Lubyanka Square, he should sell the statue to those who cherish Dzerzhinsky's memory. He proposes buying the statue for $1.5 million.

"In my heart, I consider Dzerzhinsky my grandfather," said Razin, a Communist member of the Duma, the lower house of parliament.

Razin, who became an orphan at age 1, said he is acting at the request of the Association of Orphanages of Russia. Dzerzhinsky, in addition to creating the secret police, established the Soviet Union's network of mammoth, prison-like orphanages, institutions where homeless children are still consigned.

"We were brought up according to the system invented by Dzerzhinsky," Razin said fondly. "He was 'Iron Felix,' who became the father of all children and orphans. He offered great hope to those who were handicapped by life."

Razin promises to erect the statue at the boyhood home of former Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, in Privolnoye village - a property Razin bought in 1993. He calls the statue's current location in a sculpture garden of fallen Soviet heroes near Gorky Park "an insult" and "a disgrace."

Razin said he made a $500,000 down payment on the statue to the mayor's office in October but without consulting the mayor. He insists that Luzhkov must now decide whether to return the monument to the Lubyanka as promised, leave it in obscurity or hand it over to Razin.

Alexander S. Tantlevsky, chief of the city's Department of Preservation of Cultural and Artistic Heritage, declined to discuss Razin's offer. "There is nothing to talk about or comment on," he said.

When he proposed restoring the Dzerzhinsky statue to its former place of honor in Lubyanka Square, Mayor Luzhkov talked of Dzerzhinsky's good deeds in establishing orphanages. But Razin - like many other Russians - suspected that Luzhkov's real aim was to please President Vladimir V. Putin, a former KGB colonel.

Putin has shown an increasing fondness for emblems of the Soviet era. This week he restored the red star as the symbol of the military. Earlier, he brought back the music of the old Soviet anthem, though with rewritten lyrics.

And perhaps no Soviet figure is more revered within Russia's Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB, than Dzerzhinsky. The agency's 2001 calendar - meant strictly for internal use - featured a photo of the Dzerzhinsky monument standing in Lubyanka Square.

"When Putin meets an FSB official, he is always asked one and the same question: 'Comrade President, will you put the statue back?'" Razin said. "And he feels awkward that, as president, he can't do that."

Luzhkov's proposal to return the statue to Lubyanka Square was protested by reform politicians. The Kremlin then disavowed Luzhkov's plan. "Today, some are calling for the restoration of the Dzerzhinsky statue; tomorrow others will demand the removal of Lenin's body from the mausoleum" on Red Square, Vladislav Surkov, a deputy head of the Putin administration, said in September. "Both [ideas] are equally inopportune and unacceptable to a significant portion of the citizens of our country."

Dzerzhinsky, following orders of Vladimir Lenin, created the "Cheka," the Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle against Counterrevolution, Espionage, Speculation and Sabotage, on Dec. 20, 1917. Over the next decades, that vast Soviet security apparatus changed its name several times - to OGPU, the NKVD and the KGB - but never relinquished its sweeping power and ruthless tactics.

Its main weapon was state-sponsored terror, and Dzerzhinsky said its mission was simple: "We are not fighting a war against individuals; we are exterminating the bourgeois as a class."

Now, the middle class that Dzerzhinsky had hoped to elminate expresses nostalgia for Soviet times. For many Russians, after a decade of lawlessness and epic corruption, reform is a bitter joke, democracy a dirty word, while well-to-do Russians, including many children of Soviet bureaucrats, cherish memories of their privileged youths.

Razin seems like an unlikely champion of either the impoverished or the former Soviet elite. When he was a year old, in 1964, his parents died in an automobile accident; he was raised in an orphanage near his home village of Privolnoye in southern Russia. By luck, his grandmother landed a job working as a maid in the home of an up-and-coming Communist Party chief, Gorbachev.

When Razin was 13, he attended a Gorbachev family picnic in Privolnoye. The future leader of the Soviet Union smiled and placed his hands on Razin's shoulders. Someone took a snapshot, and it was given to the boy. Razin's fortune was made. "I started to claim that I was Gorbachev's nephew, and everybody believed me," he recalled. He had the picture to prove it.

Gorbachev brought Razin to Moscow and found him a job in the Ministry of Culture. Razin founded the singing group "Tender May," which became one of the most popular groups in the Soviet Union. As "the false nephew of Gorbachev," as Razin calls himself, he said he eventually earned about $10 million.

After Gorbachev left office, in December 1991, the KGB agents assigned to protect the former Soviet leader abandoned Gorbachev's mother. So, Razin said, he took her in.

In 1993, she agreed to sell Razin the family home, where Razin let her remain. In an interview with Kimsomolskaya Pravda, he accused his former patron of neglecting his mother. Gorbachev sued to block the sale, but his case collapsed when his mother testified against him. She died in 1995.

Today, Razin represents Privolnoye in the Duma, where he has a reputation for flamboyant gestures and anti-capitalist oratory. That a man who earned his wealth in Soviet times is now a champion of the secret police chief who said he intended to exterminate the bourgeoisie seems to leave no impression on him.

Razin is also chairman of the Fine Arts Committee of Stavrapol, which is putting up the $1.5 million for the purchase of the statue. As the group's chairman, he said, he will hold Moscow accountable. If the city refuses to sell the statue, he vows, he will sue the municipality for "ignoring or neglecting a piece of art."