Captain Alexander Zuzenko tried to bring the Bolshevik Revolution to Australia, with the aim of spreading it to the world. His extraordinary story, little known in Australia, is told in a new book. Ann Arnold reports.

The first time Alexander Zuzenko was thrown out of Australia, this powerfully built man, 6'4" tall, resisted so strongly being put aboard a ship that he was manacled for the journey.

It was April 1919, and the month before he’d led a protest, which became a riot, through the streets of Brisbane, in the name of social revolution. He’d fought with a soldier who tried to wrest his red flag from him.

Australian authorities had long been watching Mr Zuzenko and his fellow revolutionaries, many of whom had settled around South Brisbane, where Southbank is now, after the First World War. Quite a few had escaped Tsarist prisons in Siberia and gone east, landed in Shanghai, or Japan, then taken a ship heading south, getting off in Brisbane.

They found work on the docks, in the abattoirs, and in the railway workshops in Ipswich. Kevin Windle, from the ANU’s School of Language Studies, has researched Mr Zuzenko for years and has published Undesirable: Captain Zuzenko and the Workers of Australia and the World.

The idea was that once the revolution took off in Brisbane, it would quickly spread over the rest of Queensland, and then throughout Australia, and thence quickly back to the Mother Country, and throughout the Empire, and you’ve have world revolution before you knew it.

He discovered, in the archives of the Communist International (Comintern) in Moscow, the papers of the Ipswich branch of the Union of Russian Workers. Its members were closely following events in their homeland, and pledging to extend the revolutionary fervour.

There was, at the time, Dr Windle says, much Russian romanticising of foreign lands where there was greater equality. The Russian community in the Brisbane region was about 5000 strong. Mr Zuzenko was a leader of the more radical elements, at times editing Russian newspapers, opposing the World War and conscription, and incurring the wrath of returned soldiers.

He once wrote that ‘the first of all Anglo-Saxon countries to declare itself a true Workers’ Republic will be Australia’.

His expulsion, then, was perhaps only a matter of time. His new wife Civa, who was pregnant, wanted to leave with him, but her parents forbade her. So the shackled Mr Zuzenko sailed with two other deportees from Sydney to Bombay, where he was imprisoned for five or six weeks, and endured scurvy.

He was put aboard another ship for Egypt, and held in prisons there. Civa found him: she’d sailed as a free passenger on a different ship. After a period together in Constantinople—Mr Zuzenko having escaped Turkish authorities—the couple journeyed warily to Odessa, in Russia.

Odessa was still held by the Whites, to whom Australia was deporting Mr Zuzenko, but he punted that there was sufficient turmoil and confusion in that city for him to assume a false name and nobody would know who he was. It worked.

Civa gave birth to their daughter just before the Reds re-invaded Odessa, and Mr Zuzenko was able to declare himself to them. Soon afterwards, in Moscow at the Second Congress of the Communist International, he made contacts including Lenin himself, and was appointed an agent of the Comintern, with the mission of extending the revolution worldwide.

Mr Zuzenko had told the Comintern that Australia was ‘the Achilles heel of British Imperialism’.

The idea, Dr Windle says, was that ‘once the revolution took off in Brisbane, it would quickly spread over the rest of Queensland, and then throughout Australia, and thence quickly back to the Mother Country, and throughout the Empire, and you’d have world revolution before you knew it.’

Mr Zuzenko’s specific brief was to get the divided Australian Communist Party working together as an effective revolutionary unit. Sailing via Norway to Liverpool, he was put in touch there with Communist luminaries such as Sylvia Pankhurst, George Lansbury and Bessie Braddock. Bessie, later the Member of Parliament for Liverpool, was then 20-year-old Elizabeth Bamber. She and her fiancé Jack Braddock took it upon themselves to look after Mr Zuzenko, and help him find a ship to Australia.

Over the next two years he sailed the globe, spreading the revolutionary word in Vancouver, New York and Auckland, before docking in Melbourne. He was gifted, Dr Windle says, with great powers of persuasion. But he didn’t outfox the Australian authorities, and despite arriving in disguise this time, he was soon identified and deported once again, this time landing in Brixton Prison.

Having trained originally as a seaman, the next chapter of his life was spent captaining a ship that plied between London and Leningrad, taking some of Europe’s leading intellectuals and activists to see the great Soviet experiment. Among his passengers and acquaintances were Henri Barbusse, George Bernard Shaw, Katharine Susannah Pritchard, William Gallacher, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and the future Cambridge spies Anthony Blunt and Michael Straight.

Mr Zuzenko, still an imposing ‘bear of a man’, cast himself as an unofficial envoy, addressing his passengers and crew, and still a persuasive speaker. At times, he censored what was read and said on board about the USSR, reportedly burning one hapless passenger’s book because he disagreed with it.

For his troubles on behalf of his homeland, he was shot in 1938 by Stalin’s henchmen during the purges, having falsely been branded a ‘British spy’ and imprisoned.

Versions of his story have been told in Russia, often embellished, but Dr Windle’s book is the first full account in English and based on historical records. It introduces a larger than life figure to the Australian public, who until now knew little of the Brisbane Bolsheviks and their goal of worldwide revolution.

Listen to Phillip Adams's interview with author Kevin Windle at Late Night Live.