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[STALIN’S FRIEND IN AUSTRALIA] Iz Avstralii [i.e. From Australia] // Prosveshchenie. #10. [i.e. The Enlightenment]

Artyom [Sergeev, F.A.]

Item #703

St. Petersburg: Pechatniy trud, 1913. 116 pp. Original printed wrappers. Minor soiling of the wrappers. Otherwise very good.

An extremely scarce account of Australian life of one of the top members of Bolshevik party of the time, Fyodor Sergeev (known as Artyom) printed in the main periodical of the Bolshevik party at the time, ‘The Enlightenment’, the distribution of which was forbidden.
The member of the party since 1901, in his early life Artyom was very active during the revolution of 1905, and after few arrests in 1902-1906 he managed to escape the law enforcement till 1909 when he became one of the most wanted revolutionaries at the time. Finally, in 1909 he was caught and sentenced to the life imprisonment in Siberia.
In 1910 he managed to escape and flee to China, then to Australia. In 1911 he became the active member of Brisbane Russian Community, radicalized it eventually turning it into the Marxist Workers Union. He was a member of Australian Socialist Party and was known under the name ‘Big Tom’. After being arrested several times for organizing the demonstrations, including the one on the 1st of May, 1917 in Darwin, Artyom went back to Russia and became one of the key figures in Bolshevik revolution and the Civil War. He has organized the Donetsk-Krivoy-Rog Republic in Ukraine which became the important outpost for the Red Army’s battle for Ukraine.
In 1922 he died in the experimental aero-wagon alongside with Australian communist John Freeman. In 1917-1922 Artyom befriended Joseph Stalin and Stalin has adopted his son. Stalin always believed that Artyom’s death was planned by Trotsky and his allies.
In the article Artyom criticized Australian state, ‘which is praised in Russia for reasons unknown’ and gives the thorough overview of the Australian political system from the socialist point of view, mentioning the success of the first New Zealand Socialist Party MP and the high voting rates for Socialists in New South Wales.
In the same issue, Lenin’s article ‘Critical Notes on the Ethnical Question’ appeared.

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