Artem

Artem (Артем) (Communist party pseudonym of Fedor Sergeev), b 18 March 1883 in Glebovo, Kursk region, Russia, d 24 July 1921 in an air disaster, buried in Moscow. (Photo: Artem.) Russian revolutionary and Soviet official. From 1903 to 1906 Artem did propaganda and organizational work for the Bolsheviks in the eastern industrial centers of Ukraine. A follower of Vladimir Lenin, he spent the years 1910–17 in Australia. On the outbreak of the Revolution of 1917 he returned to Ukraine; he led the Bolshevik faction in the Kharkiv Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies and became secretary of the oblast committee of the Bolshevik organizations in the Donets Basin and the Kharkiv and Katerynoslav regions. He was also a member of the People's Secretariat (the first Soviet government in Ukraine), serving as People's Commissar of Industry and Trade (see People’s commissariats of the Ukrainian SSR). At the beginning of 1918 Artem headed the Council of People's Commissars of the Donets–Kryvyi Rih Soviet Republic. In 1918–19 he was vice-chairman of the Provisional Workers' and Peasants' Government of Ukraine; in 1920 he became head of the Executive Committee of Donets gubernia as well as a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine and of the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee. Late in 1920 he was transferred to Party and government work in Moscow. Many towns, cities, schools, and factories in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic have been named after Artem.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 1 (1984).]