Slavonic and East European Review

REVIEWS 381 ‘Very few at the Commissariat knew Poland well, even though some Poles worked there […]. By-and-large, neither persons of Polish origin, nor Polish Jews were sent to leading positions at the Warsaw legation in order to forestall accusations of meddling in the internal affairs of a foreign state. Vojkov was, so-to-speak, a necessary evil’ (p. 345). Many a contemporary observer, as well as subsequent historians, referred to early Soviet Russia as an enigma. But the relationship also functioned vice versa. The Warsaw story tells us what a long and winding road the Soviets travelled towards their understanding of an interwar European state. Prague Pavol Jakubec Windle, Kevin. Undesirable: Captain Zuzenko and the Workers of Australia and the World. Australian Scholarly Publishing, North Melbourne, 2012. xxi + 274 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $39.95 (paperback). In the history of the Russian Revolution and early Soviet state, the name Aleksandr Mikhailovich Zuzenko does not loom large, if at all. Kevin Windle aims is to rescue Zuzenko from near oblivion and reveal his roles in the history of Russian and Australian radicalism and the intrigues of the Communist International. Zuzenko travelled widely and encountered an amazing array of people, among them Henri Barbusse, Mikhail Bulgakov, Vladimir Lenin, John Reed, Karl Radek and George Bernard Shaw. While the details of Zuzenko’s career are frequently fascinating, in the end it is not clear that they really add up to much. Dr Kevin Windle is an associate professor of translation studies and Russian at the National University of Australia. His interests include Russian settlement in Australia and the relationship of the Australian Communist Party with the USSR. In this study of Zuzenko, he surely has done his research. The centrepiece is the Australia-related files of the Comintern records (Fond 495) enhanced by documents from the National Archives of Australia, the Queensland State Archives and the UK National Archives, as well as personal papers of the Zuzenko family. He has done a diligent job of tracking down many of the Zuzenko’s articles and personal writings, no easy task given the many noms de plume Zuzenko employed. Windle quotes extensively from many of these sources, sometimes a little too extensively. Zuzenko’s biography follows a familiar pattern for Russian radicals of his generation. Despite his later identification with all things proletarian, he was born in 1884 into a petit-bourgeois environment. A ‘rebellious temperament’ (p. 3) contributed to a cycle of radicalization, expulsion, arrest and exile. In SEER, 93, 2, APRIL 2015 382 the wake of 1917, his radicalism morphed from anarchism to a near-fanatical devotion to Bolshevism. As with so many others, this would not save him from ‘repression’ under Stalin. Along the way, Zuzenko became a sailor, terrorist, labour organizer, journalist, Comintern agent, ship’s captain and would-be Lenin of Australia. In thirteen brisk chapters, Windle’s main challenge is to sort fact from myth which turns out to be no easy task. The greatest mythmaker was Zuzenko himself. Arguably a braggart, fantasist or pathological liar, Zuzenko was inclined to exaggeration, and Windle does not call him on this as much as he might. Early on, Windle avers that Zuzenko was ‘gifted with unusual powers of persuasion’ (p. xix), yet what comes across more clearly is ‘his unfortunate tendency to make enemies of friends and comrades’ (p. 120). ‘Supremely confident of his own abilities’ (p. 144), Zuzenko bitterly attacked anyone or anything he deemed lacking proper revolutionary spirit. For instance, he regarded Anglo-Saxons, the British in particular, as infected with a ‘slavish servility’ (p. 158) and espoused a kind of Russian revolutionary supremacy of which he, naturally, was a sterling example. Zuzenko, however, was convinced that Australia possessed an ‘immense revolutionary potential’ (p. 158) and his quixotic attempts to exploit it are the heart of his story. An early effort to raise a pro-Bolshevik movement in Brisbane led to his deportation in 1919. In Moscow, he convinced the Comintern to send him back. Finally reaching Australia in the summer of 1922, he was at large for only a couple of months before again being arrested and deported. Needless to say, he did not achieve...