...He was born in 1883, as
Fedor Andreevich Sergeev, into a family dynasty of church builders, whose fame
spread all across Southern Russia and Eastern Ukraine, where they had been
building churches for several generations on record, since at least the reign
of Catherine the Great.
At the age of eighteen,
in 1901, Fedor was sent to Moscow, to study at one of the best and most
prestigious technical schools in Russia, Moscow Technical Imperial School, currently
The Bauman State Technological University. His father Andrei always
preferred the ancient city of Moscow to the upstart Russian capital of St.
Petersburg, and now his preference determined his school choice in this case,
too. It was not long before Fedor became an activist revolutionary.
To the modern ear, the
word revolutionary sounds like something exceptional and extraordinary,
but in the times I describe, being a revolutionary was the standard rite
of passage. Nearly all students at all Russian colleges, male and female, were
militant radicals. Political conservatives among them, such as my maternal
grandfather Mitrophan, were the rarest of exceptions. (Even Konstantin
Pobedonostsev, known as the Gray Eminence of Russia's ultra-reactionary
forces near the turn of the century, used to be something between an
ultra-liberal and a radical reformer himself, in his younger years.)
Fedor Sergeev enjoyed
being a revolutionary and went through the routine with flying colors. At the
age of nineteen he was first arrested, expelled from his college, and, to his
delight, served a short jail sentence. His next step was going abroad, for
which reason he emigrated to Paris in 1902. He was much more fascinated with
the French capital, which was by no means a usual place of emigration for the
Russian revolutionaries, than with the traditional places of exile, like London
and Geneva, where most of them dwelled. However, he was fond of traveling in
Europe, and in the fall of 1904 (where else but in Geneva?) he, predictably,
but still fatefully, met Comrade Nicholas, alias Lenin, whose
fame as a one-of-a-kind eccentric iconoclast had been constantly growing and
spreading.
Lenin showed an immediate
interest in Artem. He happened to know Artem’s real name, and what it meant.
Although every revolutionary résumé was always shamelessly padded, their company
not excluded, certain details could not be invented. Like the Sergeev name. It
was not a household name in Europe, of course, but Lenin shrewdly appreciated
its broad recognition in the south of Russia, home of Russia’s authentic
blue-collar working class, whom he, Lenin, claimed to represent.
Following Lenin, Artem remained
very much his own man, just like Lenin, who never viewed his own undercover
police work as a job in which he was the employee. The two aspiring revolutionaries
intended to use each other shamelessly, and were always ready to part their
ways, as soon as one of them had outlived his usefulness to the other.
But for now, their
relationship got into a full swing. In early 1905, Artem was back in Russia,
working the crowds on Lenin’s orders in his home base of the coal-rich South.
Soviet sources list his impressive titles during this period. He is elected
head of the Bolshevik organization in Kharkov, one of the largest cities of the
Russian Empire, even before his twenty-second birthday (!!!), and leads a
massive uprising in Eastern Ukraine in December 1905.
The next step on his road
to revolutionary greatness is an exile to Siberia. Then he ought to escape back
to Europe, and so on, according to the script. In early 1906, in recognition of
his fast progress, he is chosen to be a delegate to the Fourth Congress of the
RSDLP, in Stockholm. Soon thereafter, he is arrested and sent to Western
Siberia. He does not waste any time escaping, and soon finds himself in the
city of Perm, where he is instantly declared the head of the Perm RSDLP
Committee. Now is his time to go back to Europe, to attend the Fifth RSDLP
Congress in London. But in March 1907 he is arrested again, and now sent
farther East, into another Siberian exile.
This new exile proves
much tougher than the first one, and lasts three whole years. Eventually, Artem
gets his chance to escape, and in 1910, via Korea and China, finds himself in
Australia, of all places. He quickly takes control of the Russian blue-collar
community in Queensland, and loses no time in becoming a union leader, a
newspaper publisher, a British citizen, and… a married man… Everybody calls him
Big Tom these days. Despite his relatively small physical stature this
is hardly an exaggeration. After all, as an amateur boxer he has always been
second to none…
(This is the end of Part
II. Part III will be posted tomorrow.)
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