Fadeyev was born in Kimry, Tver Governorate. From 1908 to 1912, he lived in Chuguyevka, Primorsky Krai. He joined the Bolshevik Party in 1918 and took part in the guerrilla movement against the Japanese interventionists and the White Army during the Russian Civil War. In 1927, he published the novel "The Rout" (also known as "The Nineteen"), in which he described youthful guerrilla fighters. In 1930, he published the first part of the novel "The Last of the Udege", on which he continued working the rest of his life (an edition containing the second volume, all he was able to complete, was published in 1940.) In it, Fadeyev intended to show "that an extremely primitive people may experience a leap from tribal communism to the complex collective organization of the twentieth century, skipping over the intervening historical stages: family, private property, slavery, feudalism, capitalism and socialism. [...] Uneven though it is, "The Last of the Udegs" contains some of Fadeyev's best pages, and the fact that he spent his energies on literary administration rather than on the completion of this novel is a minor tragedy."