People's Train, The

- Blurb -

THE PEOPLE'S TRAIN is firmly based in the truth. From the Russian uprising of 1905 to the early 1910s, a number of Russian victims of the Okhrana, the Tsarist secret police, came to Queensland. They were socialists and revolutionaries.. In 1911 Artem (F.A.) Sergeiev, about 34 years of age, an educated peasant and a veteran agent of Lenin's, a man of considerable charisma, arrived with his friend Suvarov. Artem had been imprisoned and then sent to eastern Siberia from which he escaped to Vladivostok and Shanghai. In Queensland he is happy to begin as a labourer in a railway camp in Warwick. But soon he is living in the Russian enclave in South Brisbane, and his natural organizational abilities, which will one day make him a member of the Central Committee in Russia, take over. He leads the Queensland Russians into a tramways strike that becomes a general strike, during which he meets two remarkable women, Amelia, a suffragette and leader of a typists' union and, and Hope Delohrey, radical daughter of an eminent Queensland pastoral family and wife of a Queen's Counsel. The strikers invade the office of the Brisbane Tramways, and meet a Melbourne engineer named Foley who has an invention - the single rail railway, a People's Train, which he intends to develop for Brisbane. When World War I starts, Federal officials tell the Brisbane Russians that they are to join the AIF or be deported to Russia and into the Tsar's prisons and camps again. The genial Suvarov returns to Russia to agitate in the Russian army. Artem is the leading resister in the Russian community and spends a month in Boggo Road Gaol. Foley is also a leading anti-war activist and anti-conscriptionist, and he and Artem thus meet again. Artem's own new compadre is a silver-miner from Broken Hill named Paddy Dykes, who becomes Artem's bodyguard. Paddy is an admirable fellow, a reader, a former union official whose family hardships make him believe that capitalism can't be negotiated with. While Artem is narrator of the Australian section of the book, Paddy will become narrator of Artem's coming Russian adventures. For in February 1917, an anti-Tsarist revolution begins in Russia, and Artem and Paddy resolve to return via Vladivostok.