By Motega R

The following is Part 2 of the 3 part series on Comrade Artyom and Paul Freeman. Read part 1 here.

Following his escape from Tsarist imprisonment, the Bolshevik revolutionary Artyom (Fyodor Sergeyev) fled Russia, marking the beginning of an extended period of exile abroad. Although this was not his first departure from the country, it would prove to be his lengthiest absence—one that significantly shaped his political perspective and distinguished him from fellow Old Bolsheviks such as Lazar Kaganovich and Vyacheslav Molotov. Unlike his contemporaries, who predominantly sought refuge in Europe, Artyom instead chose to flee eastward to China, before finally ending up in Queensland, Australia.

Artyom’s motivation for travelling east as opposed to West remain unclear. According to some accounts he may have done so under instructions from Lenin. As we shall see later, Artyom and Lenin corresponded throughout Artyom’s time in exile. Artyom’s defining maxim and most famous attribution is, “I hate to see a working class unorganised,” a statement that encapsulated his lifelong commitment to proletarian mobilisation. This principle explains his attraction to Queensland, where a radical Russian diaspora provided fertile ground for organising. There is also evidence that Lenin, recognising Artyom’s exceptional skill as a mass organiser in eastern Ukraine, encouraged his political work in Australia and viewed it as an extension of his revolutionary practice.

The White Coolie: Artyom in China – Internationalism without limits

Artyom spent most of his exile (1910 to 1917) in Australia. But according to biographical materials from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (the legal successor to the Russian branch of the CPSU and currently Russia’s second-largest political party) he also spent a critical year in China. During this time, he made brief stops in Nagasaki, Harbin (a center of the Russian diaspora), and Hong Kong, but the majority of his stay was devoted to Shanghai.

China was then a semi-colonial country dominated by foreign powers. In contrast to most Europeans residing in the country, who generally lived a privileged existence, Artyom chose to live and work amongst the Chinese working class. Russian sources describe him labouring as a ‘coolie’ in this period—a term denoting unskilled migrant workers in colonial contexts. Later in Australia, Artyom would be a fierce opponent of the anti-Chinese racism that reigned hegemonic in the Australian socialist and trade union movements. It is quite likely that Artyom’s antagonism to chauvinism and racism were motivated by the time he spent with Chinese workers.

There are no records of Artyom engaging in any direct political organising during this period of exile. The Communist Party of China did not exist at the time, having been founded in 1921 in the revolutionary glow of the October Revolution. If Artyom was active in communist politics, it is unclear with what organisation he would have collaborated.

The Bolshevik in Brisbane: Big Tom and the Australian Socialist Party

Artyom would arrive in Australia in early 1911, settling in Brisbane. Queensland in particular held a unique appeal for Artyom; the region hosted a significant left-wing Russian diaspora, colloquially termed “Little Siberia.” This community included figures like Alexander Prokhorov, the Nobel Prize-winning Soviet physicist (born in Queensland) whose pioneering work on laser technology later contributed to Cold War scientific advancements.

Within this diasporic network—radicalised by displacement and labour struggles—Artyom quickly emerged as a leading voice, coming to be known as “Big Tom”. He joined what was then known as the Brisbane Russian Emigrants Association and quickly transformed it into a more radical organisation, renamed the Union of Russian Workers. From 1912 Artyom served as the editor of the Union of Russian Workers’ newspaper, the Echo of Australia, which began to view itself as the political representative of the Russian diaspora working class.

The Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) identifies Artyom as a founding and leading member of the Australian Socialist Party (ASP), which also came into being in 1912. Nine years later, in 1921, the ASP would merge with the Victorian Socialist Party and some of the more radical members of the Industrial Workers of the World to form the Communist Party of Australia (CPA). Artyom’s involvement in this process is a fact of considerable historical significance: it shows that from the very beginning, immigrant and diaspora communities have been the taproot of communist organising in Australia—a lesson from Artyom’s life that we should retain today.

Artyom’s theoretical contribution to Australian socialism

One of Artyom’s most significant yet overlooked contributions to Australian socialist history was his role in shaping Lenin’s seminal critique of the Australian Labor Party (ALP). Lenin’s 1913 article “In Australia”  remains a piercing analysis of Australian class politics over a century later, and it drew directly from Artyom’s dispatches on the country’s labour movement and his writings in the Russian socialist press. Though Artyom’s observations are now historically dated, they represent the only extant Bolshevik account of Australia written before the October Revolution, offering a rare transnational perspective on its labour struggles.

These reflections were later compiled in a USSR-published book titled Lucky Country (never translated into English), wherein Artyom sharply contested the myth of Australian exceptionalism. He mocked claims that Australia was a land of class harmony, gender equality, and abolished exploitation, instead detailing its repressive penal system, anti-strike laws, gendered exclusion from public life, and structural barriers to working-class political representation—particularly the prohibitive costs for workers running for office. Crucially, he identified the absence of a mature industrial proletariat as a defining feature of Australian capitalism, a condition that distorted class consciousness.

As Stuart Macintyre observes, Artyom (and through him, Lenin) argued that the infancy of Australian capitalism meant that the Australian working class was in its formative stages, and this situation fostered a false consciousness expressed through racial chauvinism and the subordination of class interests to nationalism—what the Revolutionary Communist Organisation (RCO) would later term “state loyalism.”¹ This analysis was notably advanced by historian Humphrey McQueen in his seminal New Britannia, though it remains unclear whether McQueen directly engaged with Artyom’s work.

Artyom’s devastating critique of the ALP took aim at its assimilation by the bourgeois order, emphasising its trade union ties without genuine worker control, its deeply engrained misogyny, and its flagrantly racist policy positions—including the sinophobia that constitutes one of the most significant continuities of the Australian left.²

Artyom’s legacy allows us to take a critical look at the history of the CPA, particularly in terms of its relationship to the ALP. A common misconception holds that the CPA emerged from a split within the Australian Labor Party (ALP), akin to the French (PCF), Italian (PCI), and even American Communist Parties, which broke from their respective Second International affiliates. Unlike these European parties, which maintained electoral strength and independent trade union bases, the CPA never meaningfully severed ties with the ALP, which continued to have influence within the trade union movement. Even during the Comintern’s “Third Period” (1928–1935), when Moscow demanded militant separatism, the CPA continued collaborating with the ALP in federal elections, drawing Comintern criticism.

It should be remembered that the ALP was never a socialist organisation, despite its position as the political representative of the trade union movement. As Gilbert Giles Roper notes in Labor’s Titan, the 1921 ALP Conference’s adoption of a “socialisation objective” was directly indebted to the reverberations of the October Revolution in Australia.³ The socialisation objective remains in the ALP constitution as of 2025, although it is very clearly not upheld in any practical sense. Kwame Nkrumah said that “socialism requires socialists to build it,” and in Australia there were few socialists, especially in the ALP. As Lenin observed in What is to be Done?, trade union consciousness is not socialist consciousness, and the former does not spontaneously transform into the latter.⁴ Throughout the twentieth century, the socialist movement in Australia (including the CPA) failed to hold this distinction clearly in mind. As a result, it was never able to fully disembroil itself from the Labor Party.

This is one lesson we can learn from Artyom. Another is that issues of race and gender, which are often dismissed as “identity politics,” have always been regarded as serious issues by communists. They have been openly fought and challenged, not only by university activists supposedly influenced by intersectional theory, but by old Bolsheviks themselves. Alongside Artyom’s role in organising amongst ethnic and diaspora communities, the fight against racial and gendered oppression is a defining feature of Artyom’s life and time in Australia.

Reference list

Macintrye, Stuart. The Reds: The Communist Party of Australia from origins to illegality. NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2022.

Lenin. What is to be Done? in Collected Works vol. 5, 347-530. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961.

McIlroy, Jim. Australia’s First Socialists. NSW: Resistance Books, 2003.

Roper, Gilbert Giles. Labor’s Titan: The Story of Percy Brookfield 1878-1921. Warrnambool: Warrnambool Institute Press, 1983.

Windle, Kevin. A Troika of Agitators: Three Comintern Liaison Agents in Australia, 1920-22. Vol. 52, no. 1, 1 Mar. 2006, pp. 30–47, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8497.2006.00406a.x. Accessed 12 June 2023.

Notes

1. Stuart Macintrye, The Reds: The Communist Party of Australia from origins to illegality (NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2022), 43-44. ↩︎
2. Macintrye, The Reds, 32. ↩︎
3. Gilbert Giles Roper, Labor’s Titan: The Story of Percy Brookfield 1878-1921 (Warrnambool: Warrnambool Institute Press, 1983), chapter 7. ↩︎
4. See Lenin, What is to be Done?, in Collected Works vol. 5 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961), 375-387. ↩︎