COMRADE ARTEM. PART I.

…The story of the life and death of my grandfather Comrade Artem (Fedor Andreevich Sergeev), the least known great leader of the Russian Revolution.

This account of Artem’s life, largely taken from my book Stalin, and Other Family, dates back to the 1990’s, when the Internet was non-existent. The world has changed quite radically since then, information-wise. A properly interested reader has a much better chance to visit the previously rarely or never visited chambers of history today than ever before, and I encourage my reader to such exploits. Please, be aware, however, that too many articles posted on the Web do not pass the standards of credibility, even those coming from official sites and allegedly reputable sources. But still, the window of informational opportunity has been thrust so much wider open that the Internet phenomenon must be greeted with great appreciation, although not without some serious caveats.

The most serious caveat is of course that the problem of history unknown, ignored and misunderstood, has not received a radical solution with the invention of the Internet, as the latter, not being much different from an encyclopedia (although, as some would justifiably argue, it is often qualitatively inferior to one), remains a mere information tool, and does not solve the deep-seated chronic problems of knowledge.

With this preamble, let us venture forward with our entry’s central subject.

Comrade Who?... Never heard of him!.. No wonder. His name is conspicuously absent from every Western name index in the standard historiography of the Russian Revolution of 1917. And yet, the man did exist, and held very high posts, sufficiently documented in all Soviet reference books. Six cities are named after him in Russia and Ukraine, and his remains have been laid to rest in Soviet Russia’s most sacred cemetery near the Kremlin Wall, a few feet from Lenin’s Mausoleum, alongside Stalin, and some other top leaders of Soviet Russia.

I have no problem with Western historians’ ignorance of Comrade Artem. Our modern age is drowning in information. Unless you know what you are looking for, you will be lost in an infinite space. In their place, I, too, would have seen no reason to look beyond the standard cast of characters, recognized by the world as the founding fathers of the Soviet system in Russia. That cast is in itself a handful. Why, then, spread your limited personal resources of time and energy, going across the vast expanse of uncharted seas, when you can comfortably go along with whatever you already have as a given?

On the other hand, I do have a problem with Soviet and post-Soviet historians. They should have corrected the ignominious mistake of drowning the memory of Artem in ignorance. In the recent national poll for the Greatest Russian, under the title Imya Rossiya, he ought to have been included in the starting lineup of 500, at the very least, and the fact that he was not there speaks not very well both of the organizers of the project, and generally of the unsatisfactory state of Russian history of the Soviet period even in the present time.

But I am a different story. After all Comrade Artem was my grandfather. And so, I was compelled and eager to find out what happened to him, and I did. The answer is a dark mystery. After his violent death in 1921 at the age of thirty-eight, he was effectively erased as a major historical figure. Why did he have to be falsified and diminished? Was it because the very last job he held right before his death, officially made him Lenin’s immediate successor, and Comrade Stalin, who most probably had him assassinated and had taken over his job, hated all competition, even from a dead man. (The fact that Lenin saw Comrade Artem as his successor has now been verified in the memoirs of my father General Artem Fedorovich Sergeev-Artem.)

Fortunately, Artem was a big man, and, even though obliterated, both literally and politically, many traces of him are still scattered around. They say that it takes a small bone fragment, for a professional to reconstruct the whole body of an obliterated ancestor of our human race. In Artem’s case, I have much more than that...

(This is the end of Part I. Part II will be posted tomorrow.)