Undesirable: Captain Zuzenko and the Workers of Australia and the World

Alexander Zuzenko, a sailor and veteran of the failed 1905 revolution in Russia, arrived in Australia in 1911 and embarked upon a career of industrial and political agitation and radical journalism. Soon branded 'an unscrupulous advocate of Bolshevism' by the security services, he went on to head the Union of Russian Workers in Brisbane and led the red flag demonstration in 1919, which precipitated his deportation to Soviet Russia. Three years later he returned as a clandestine agent of the Comintern, tasked with consolidating and unifying the factions of the Communist Party of Australia, a venture which ended in his second deportation. He then became a captain in the Soviet merchant fleet, in frequent contact with Western visitors such as Henri Barbusse, George Bernard Shaw, William Gallacher, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb, until Stalin's purges and a charge of being a 'British spy' ended that career in 1938.