‘A Bolshevist Agent of Some Importance’: Aleksandr Zuzenko's Autobiographical Notes and British Government Records

Abstract

Some time before his arrest in Leningrad as a supposed British agent in April 1938, Aleksandr Zuzenko, veteran revolutionary, journalist, prize fighter, master mariner, ‘Soviet archpriest’,1 hero figure in Soviet literature and instigator of the ‘Bolshevik trouble’ in Queensland, set down a brief ‘Autobiography’, dated 20 October 1936. Fourteen months later, on 2 January 1938, three months before the NKVD closed in, he wrote a separate account of his work for the Comintern in the years 1920–23, when he travelled from Moscow via Britain, the USA and Canada to Australia. That account, which is no less autobiographical than his ‘Autobiography’, tells of the many difficulties and dangers he faced during a long and arduous journey, and of his efforts to hasten the advent of the Socialist Revolution in the countries along his route, especially in his principal destination, Australia. The surviving copies are handwritten in ink in a school exercise book.2 The handwriting is not that of Zuzenko himself, as attested in other documents and letters known to be in his hand, so there is little