In 1901, Artyom was arrested for taking part in a student demonstration, and spent four months in Voronezh prison. After his release, he emigrated to Paris, where he studied at the 'Russian Higher Free School'. From 1902 he was a member of the RussianSocial Democratic Labour Party, later remaining with the Bolshevik faction of the party. He returned to Russia in 1903, and was a prominent party agitator in Yekaterinoslav, where he moved from factory to factory, finding work as a stoker. In 1905, he moved to Kharkiv, where he headed the Bolshevik organisation and in December, he led an armed rebellion by factory workers. This made him well known to the police, but he was able to evade arrest until later in 1906, when he was interned in Kharkov prison, but escaped. He was assigned by the Bolsheviks to run the organisation in Perm, where he was arrested again. After nearly three years in prison, he was deported to Siberia. In 1910 he escaped through Korea and Japan to Brisbane, Australia where he organized the Union of Russian Emigrants. In 1912 Sergeyev receiving a British citizenship was a chief-editor of "Echo of Australia" and was better known as "Big Tom". He joined the Australian Socialist Party and was involved in trade-unionist opposition to the First World War. In 1917, after the February revolution, he returned to Russia, becoming a leader of the Bolshevik faction in the Kharkiv council. In October 1917 he was organizer of a military coup-d'etat in Kharkiv and the whole Donets basin region. At the 1st congress of Soviets in Ukraine he was elected to the Central Executive Committee of Ukraine and later appointed the Ukrainian Narkom of Trade and Industry. In 1918, while Ukraine was under German occupation, Artyom was a chairman of the Sovnarkom of the unrecognized Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic in Ukraine and Narkom of Public Economy. His actions secured the nationalization of industrial centers concentrated in the eastern Ukraine. Sergeyev became one of the organizers of Ukrainian Central Military-Revolutionary Committee in resistance to Central powers and Kaledin's Cossacks. On March 27 he organized the Donetsk Army by the order of Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko, however by the end of April 1918 that army was integrated into the 5th Army of Red Army headed by Kliment Voroshilov.
Political career
In 1919, when Ukraine was under communist rule again, Artyom was appointed People's Commissar for Agitation and Propaganda, but later in the year he was transferred to Bashkiria, as Chairman of the Society for Aid to Bashkiria. He was therefore one of the first Bolsheviks to hold power in a predominantly Moslem part of the former Russian empire. In 1920, he returned to the Don basis as chairman of the Miners' Union.
