In attempting to deport a troublemaker, Australia helped create a martyr

Along the Kremlin Wall in Moscow lies the grave of Paul Freeman – buried beside Soviet leaders and revolutionaries. An unlikely resting place for a prospector who once worked the copper fields of outback Queensland, Freeman’s story is a gripping – and unsettling – glimpse into Australia’s postwar history.

His journey from the bush to Bolshevik martyrdom began in obscurity. Born around 1884, probably in Germany, he later registered as an American citizen and worked as a miner in Pennsylvania and Nevada before settling in NSW in 1911.

At Broken Hill, he joined the Australian Socialist Party, later aligning with the militant Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), nicknamed the Wobblies, and emerging as a vocal anti-conscription activist during the 1916-1917 debates.

After prime minister Billy Hughes banned the Wobblies in 1917, Freeman moved to Cloncurry, Queensland, where he worked in the mines and later prospected independently, naming his shafts with defiant flair: The International, Four Slaves, and Freedom. His anti-war activism, coupled with rumours of a rich copper discovery, attracted powerful interests.

In January 1919, Freeman was arrested under the War Precautions Act and transported to Sydney, then placed aboard the Sonoma for deportation. Officially, the charge was a failure to notify authorities of a change of address, though it seemed more personal. W.H. Corbould, general manager of the Mount Elliott Mining Company, was later named as the source behind Freeman’s removal.

Freeman’s deportation quickly spiralled into farce. After being refused entry to the United States, he spent months aboard the Sonoma, crisscrossing the Pacific. In desperation, he launched a hunger strike. When the ship docked in Sydney, more than 10,000 rallied at Pyrmont wharves to free him. A police baton charge left several injured, including future federal Labor minister Eddie Ward. Under public pressure, the government removed Freeman from the ship, but not from custody.

His deportation resumed in October, this time to Germany. His expulsion, the Australian Worker declared, had cast “a searing spotlight” on wartime authoritarianism. Between 1916 and 1920, the government expelled scores of radicals, unionists, and “enemy aliens” under sweeping emergency powers in what some historians have called the most extensive deportation campaign in Australian history.

In 1920, Freeman entered Soviet Russia, where he travelled through Petrograd (now St Petersburg), modern-day Kyiv and Murmansk. Although his bid to represent the IWW at Communist International (Comintern), a movement of communist parties advocating for a global socialist revolution, was unsuccessful, Freeman gained prominence and stood for election to the executive committee in 1921. That same year, he was sent on a covert mission to Australia to rally support for the Red International of Labor Unions, but returned to Moscow in time for the Comintern’s third congress.

Freeman died on July 24, 1921, in an accident involving an experimental monorail near Kursk. He was travelling with his comrade, “Commissar Artem” (Fedor Sergeeff). Pravda, the primary propaganda tool of the Communist Party after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, carried news of his death on its front page.

He was buried with honours at the Kremlin Wall – a rare distinction for someone once cast out of Australia as a threat.

Conspiracy theories have long surrounded Freeman’s death, with some speculating the accident was orchestrated, given his growing influence in the Soviet movement and his mission to unite Communist factions. Historians, however, deem this theory unlikely.

But his death reverberated across the international labour movement, none more powerfully than in Industrial Pioneer, where his comrade Tom Barker offered a stirring eulogy.

“Paul Freeman was one of that great army of the tireless, world-tramping, universal IWW,” Barker wrote, recalling how they first met in 1916 in Broken Hill, riding together through a desert storm from the jail to a comrade’s funeral. Years later, they reunited in Moscow, where Freeman confided he planned to remain in Russia, never imagining the fatal accident that awaited.

Barker described Freeman as a fearless agitator who crossed continents with the World Revolution “ever foremost in his mind”. His legacy, Barker believed, would live on “in the deep levels of the mines of Broken Hill”, and even among “the lonely shepherd and the migratory worker” who might picture Freeman beneath the Kremlin Wall. Though others buried there had “greater names”, none, he said, would “honour it one iota more than all that is mortal of Paul Freeman”.

To Barker, Freeman was “as true a man as ever stood in shoe leather”, one of the outlawed and deported “old guard” of the Southern Hemisphere, now resting in the revolutionary heart of the Soviet Union.

The solemnity of Freeman’s resting place contrasts sharply with today’s Moscow – once a magnet for global revolutionaries, now a city increasingly isolated from the world.

But Freeman’s story is one of transformation – of a working-class agitator made into a symbol of revolutionary defiance by the very powers that sought to erase him. His fate reveals the deep tensions in a society emerging from war: a state anxious to restore order, and a labour movement increasingly unwilling to be silenced.

In attempting to deport a troublemaker, Australia helped create a martyr. And in doing so, it unwittingly etched the name of Paul Freeman into the radical annals of the 20th century – forever remembered, far from home, beneath the shadow of the Kremlin.