Fedor Andreevich Artem

(pseudonym of F. A. Sergeev). Born Mar. 7(19), 1883, in Glebovo, Fatezh District, Kursk Province; died July 24, 1921. Soviet state and party figure. Member of the Communist Party from 1901. Born into the family of a peasant.

Artem studied at the Moscow Higher Technical School in 1901–02 but was expelled for revolutionary activity and arrested. Upon his release from prison, he emigrated to Paris in 1902. He headed the Kharkov Bolshevik organization in early 1905 and led the armed uprising in Kharkov in December 1905. He was a delegate to the Fourth Congress of the RSDLP (1906). He was arrested in 1906 but escaped soon afterward. He headed the Perm’ RSDLP committee and was a delegate to the Fifth Congress of the RSDLP (1907). In March 1907 he was arrested and sentenced to lifelong exile in Eastern Siberia. In August 1910 he escaped through Korea and China to Australia (in 1911), where he worked as a stevedore and farm laborer. He headed the union of Russian émigré workers in the state of Queensland and organized and edited the Russian social democratic newspaper A vstraliiskoe ekho (1912). Artem returned to Russia in 1917 and became the leader of the Bolshevik faction of the Kharkov soviet. In July 1917 he was elected secretary of the bureau of the Donetsk Oblast committee of the RSDLP (Bolshevik) and then secretary of the Kharkov Oblast bureau of the metal-workers trade union. He was a delegate to the Sixth Congress of the RSDLP (Bolshevik) in 1917, where he was elected a member of the Central Committee. He was one of the organizers of the armed uprising in Kharkov and in the Donbas in October 1917 and was chairman of the Kharkov soviet and of the provincial Revolutionary Military Soviet in November 1917. In December 1917 the First All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets elected him a member of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets of the Ukraine, and the latter elected him people’s secretary of trade and industry. In February 1918 he became chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars and commissar of the national economy of the Soviet Donetsk-Krivoi RogRepublic and a member of the Ukrainian Communist Party (Bolshevik) Central Committee. Artem was one of the organizers of the struggle against the troops of the counterrevolutionary Central Rada, the cossacks, Hetman Kaledin, and the Austrian and German occupation troops. In January 1919 he became vice-chairman of the Ukrainian Provisional Government. In summer 1919 he was an active participant and leader of the struggle against Denikin’s troops in the Donbas. In 1920 he became chairman of the Donetsk Province executive committee and was in charge of the restoration of the coal basin. The Eighth Party Congress (1919) elected him an alternate member and the Ninth Congress (1920) made him a member of the RCP (Bolshevik) Central Committee. He was a delegate to the Second Congress of the Communist International in July 1920. From November 1920 to 1921, he was secretary of the Moscow committee of the RCP (Bolshevik) and subsequently chairman of the central committee of the All-Russian Mine Workers’ Union. He was a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. He died during a test of an air-propelled car and is buried in Red Square in Moscow.