KEVIN WINDLE
Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2013, 274 pages, $39.95 (pb)
On the 7th of November, 1917, when the Winter
Palace was stormed in Petrograd, sealing the victory of the Russian revolution,
Alexander Mikhailovich Zuzenko, one of the revolution’s most loyal servants,
faced a local court in Ingham in northern Queensland, where he worked on the
canefields, and was fined 10 shillings for losing his ‘aliens registration
certificate’. Zuzenko was tragically to
pay a much heavier price two decades later under Stalin, writes Australian
National University academic, Kevin Windle, in Undesirable.
The young Latvian revolutionary had hurled himself into
Russia’s abortive 1905 revolution, dodging the post-uprising repression by
escaping to Australia where thousands of other Russian exiles and job-seekers
were concentrated in the labour-hungry workplaces of Queensland. Zuzenko was one of their leaders, in the
militant and anti-war Union of Russian Workers and the anarcho-syndicalist
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).
Attacked by violent patriots in Brisbane and arrested for
carrying a banned red flag, Zuzenko was deported to Russia in 1920, where the
former anarchist joined the Bolsheviks, now seeing anarchism as pretty much the
same thing as Bolshevism, not least in the proclamation that the ‘complete
abolition of the state’ was the end aim of the Moscow-based Third, or
Communist, International, the organising body for world socialist revolution.
Zuzenko’s Australian experience impressed Lenin and he was
assigned to establish an Australian communist party which he successfully
forged from the rival claimants before being arrested and again deported in
1922. In Russia, Zuzenko found an
exhausted socialist state where idealism was in reluctant retreat against the
chaos and dislocation from civil war, invasion, blockade, political isolation
and economic backwardness.
Undaunted, Zuzenko became captain of the Smolny in the Soviet merchant fleet on
the Leningrad-Hamburg-London route.
Zuzenko relished his role as unofficial envoy of Soviet Russia, once
teaching an on-board English jazz band the tune of the Marxist anthem, the
Internationale, much to the delight of the dockside German audience other than
the fuming Nazi brownshirts.
Zuzenko wasn’t to have known it at the time, however, but
his travel to capitalist countries provided some of the hostages to fortune in
the murderously paranoid new Stalinist reality, along with his anarchist past,
his ship’s costly accidents and long lay-ups for repairs (when the labels of
economic ‘saboteur’ and ‘wrecker’ carried great jeopardy) and his prominence as
an ‘Old Bolshevik’, the politically heroic and visionary socialist generation
targeted for liquidation by Stalin at the head of the rising new class of
privileged party-state bureaucrats.
It did Zuzenko no good to denounce, at a crew meeting in
1937, the ‘vile Trotskyites and Rightist renegades’ who were framed at Stalin’s
‘Show Trials’ in Moscow. Peril awaited
even those most admiring of Stalin.
Awareness of the bankruptcy of the Stalinist regime came too late to
Zuzenko who, shortly after complaining in private of the ‘fascism’ sweeping
Soviet Russia, was shot during the purges of 1938 as a ‘British spy’.
Windle regards Zuzenko’s tragic end as the shameful murder
of “a brave and lifelong revolutionary”. Windle shows a Zuzenko who, as a journalist,
may have been woodenly didactic but who made up for his lack of literary flair
with the energy and drive of a tireless organiser and the commitment and
sincerity of a motivational leader. As
even his Australian secret-police taggers conceded, Zuzenko’s ‘fluency and
forcefulness as a speaker’ rightly scored him high on political effectiveness.
Zuzenko’s political competencies, however, came at the cost
of a sometimes divisive bluntness when berating local communists for
ideological deviation, organisational incompetence and lack of revolutionary
ardour. Zuzenko, a veteran of high
political and industrial drama in revolutionary Russia, also tactlessly vented
his frustration with the ‘apathy and inactivity’, and xenophobia, of the
Anglo-Saxon proletariat.
In the end, however, what betrayed Zuzenko’s socialist hopes
were not these hurdles but Stalin’s counter-revolution. Windle, despite his warm regard for Zuzenko,
is dismissive of his socialism – an ideology, says Windle, which may once have
had some potency but which “now belongs firmly in the past”, a “misguided
conviction” of purely historical interest.
To so blithely dismiss what inspired Zuzenko, with no consideration of
the new language, forms and political fronts of a still-evolving socialist
politics, is to betray Zuzenko and the other Bolshevik pioneers of socialism a
second time.
