The Civil War food administrator who designed the grain dictatorship
A story tells that he fainted from hunger on a train while travelling to organize grain seizures, but the anecdote is unverified; it circulated in the 1939 film Lenin in 1918, and one chronicle calls it a tale from later Soviet propaganda. Lenin's June 1919 order doubling his salary is documented.
Born in 1870 at Alyoshki (now Oleshky, Ukraine) as the son of a minor official in a poor, many-child family, he organized a Marxist student circle in 1891. Arrested in 1893 and expelled from the Kherson agricultural school, he worked as a statistician; he joined the RSDLP in 1898 and served as an Iskra agent in Ufa and Kharkiv before a three-year Olonets exile in 1902. In 1917 he led the Ufa soviet and city duma and sent grain echelons to Petrograd; as People's Commissar for Food from February 1918 to December 1921 he proposed the food dictatorship at the 8 May 1918 Sovnarkom meeting and organized the food detachments and kombedy. He later served as Deputy Chairman of Sovnarkom, Rabkrin chief and Gosplan chairman. He died in the Crimea in May 1928 and was buried in the Kremlin Wall.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1893–1898Expelled from Kherson Agricultural Institute; worked as statistician and agronomist, social-democratic agitation
- 1898Joined RSDLP; served as Iskra agent in Ufa and Kharkiv
- 1902–1904Arrested and sentenced to three years' exile in Olonets Governorate; returned to Ufa in November 1904
- 1905–1917Bolshevik underground work under cover as manager of Prince Kugushev's estates in Ufa
- 1917Ufa RSDLP(b) committee member, City Duma chairman; organized grain trains to Petrograd
- 1917–1921Deputy People's Commissar for Food from November 1917, then RSFSR People's Commissar for Food from 25 February 1918 to 2 December 1921, directing the food dictatorship, prodrazvyorstka and armed food detachments
- 1921–1923Deputy Chairman of Sovnarkom RSFSR/USSR and People's Commissar of Rabkrin
- 1923–1925Chairman of Gosplan under the USSR Sovnarkom; his 1925–26 control figures launched regular annual planning
- 1925–1926People's Commissar for Foreign and Internal Trade of the USSR
Related historical events
- 1905–1907The Revolution of 1905Ufa Bolshevik organizerWorking under cover as manager of Prince Kugushev's estates in Ufa, he organized the 1905 strikes and an underground press while serving as an Iskra agent.
- 1918–1922The Civil War and Foreign InterventionPeople's Commissar for FoodAs People's Commissar for Food he enforced the food dictatorship decree of May 1918 and organized the Food Army to carry out compulsory grain requisitioning.
- 1921–1922The Russian Famine of 1921–1922People's Commissar for FoodAuthored the May 1918 food dictatorship decree and directed the armed food detachments and grain requisitioning whose cumulative effect stripped peasants of sowing capacity, a structural cause of the famine.
- 1921–1928The New Economic Policy (NEP)People's Commissar of Food
The Food Dictatorship System: Decree, Apparatus, and Human Cost
On 8 May 1918, Tsyurupa presented a draft decree to the Council of People's Commissars granting emergency powers to the People's Commissar for Food. Lenin personally revised the draft during the meeting, directing that 'a ruthless and terrorist struggle and war' be declared against peasants who hoarded grain. On 13 May the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (VTsIK) formally adopted the food dictatorship decree, which declared owners of surplus grain who withheld it from state collection points to be 'enemies of the people,' subject to imprisonment of not less than ten years, confiscation of all property, and permanent expulsion from the community.
The People's Commissariat for Food (Narkomprod) under Tsyurupa grew into a massive distribution apparatus numbering some 145,000 employees. Lenin praised the result: 'Tsyurupa has set up one of the best Commissariats.' Armed food detachments (prodotryady), drawn from urban workers and poor peasants, were dispatched into the countryside, while Committees of the Poor (kombedy) were organized locally to identify and seize kulak grain. The detachments delivered half the requisitioned grain to the urban organization that had sent them and the other half to Narkomprod.
But the system came at an immense human cost. According to Orlando Figes, some 200 violent clashes between peasants and food brigades occurred in July and August 1918 alone, and the detachments frequently replicated the methods of the tsarist police: something Tsyurupa himself conceded, admitting that sometimes 'the brigades copied the behaviour of the tsarist police.' The food dictatorship saved the Red Army and the cities from starvation, but it also drove a social fissure between Soviet power and the peasant masses that persisted throughout the Civil War. With the introduction of the New Economic Policy in 1921 and the shift to a tax-in-kind, the food dictatorship system was formally brought to an end.
Collections rose from 107.9 million poods in 1918–19 to 212.5 million in 1919–20 and 367 million in 1920–21. After the Sovnarkom decree of 11 January 1919 extended prodrazvyorstka nationwide, each province received a quota that was then subdivided down to the village and the individual household.
After Narkomprod: Deputy Premiership, Rabkrin, Gosplan (1921–1928)
After handing over the food commissariat, Tsyurupa moved into the government and planning apparatus. He was Deputy Chairman of the RSFSR Council of People's Commissars in 1921–23 and Deputy Chairman of the Council of Labour and Defence (STO) from 2 December 1921. From 6 July 1923 until his death he was Deputy Chairman of the USSR Sovnarkom and of the STO. He was a member of the Bolshevik Central Committee from 1923 to 1928 and a member of the Presidium of the VTsIK and of the USSR TsIK in 1922–1928.
On 6 May 1922 he became People's Commissar of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspection (Rabkrin) of the RSFSR, succeeding Joseph Stalin, and held the post until 28 April 1923. He and Stalin had earlier clashed over food supplies while Stalin ran Rabkrin; a Rabkrin audit of Tsyurupa's own department judged it 'very imperfect, cumbersome, expensive, works poorly,' a verdict apparently not shared by Lenin.
From 11 December 1923 to 18 November 1925 he chaired the USSR State Planning Commission (Gosplan), between the two terms of G. M. Krzhizhanovsky. Regular annual national planning began under Gosplan in 1925, when it started producing yearly 'control figures': the directives for 1925–26 setting targets across all branches of the economy. Ukrainian Wikipedia calls him 'the author of the concept of the five-year plans,' but a scholarly account dates the initiative to prepare a five-year plan alongside the annual control figures to Gosplan chairman G. M. Krzhizhanovsky in 1925, so that attribution cannot be stated as fact. From 18 November 1925 to 16 January 1926 he was the first People's Commissar for Foreign and Internal Trade of the USSR, the merged commissariat; Lev Kamenev succeeded him.
Despite holding high office, he was not a major political figure. Victor Serge, who met him during the Civil War, described him as 'a man with a splendid white beard and candid eyes ... but he was a captive in offices whose occupants had obviously all primed him with lies.' One chronicle calls him scrupulously honest yet obsessed with a utopian idea, repeatedly clashing with Stalin, and notes that unlike almost all his subordinates he escaped repression only because of his early death.
He died on 8 May 1928 at Mukhalatka in the Crimea of heart failure while undergoing treatment; the body was cremated and the urn immured in the Kremlin Wall on Red Square. Some sources give the alternative death date 7 May 1928; both agree on the year 1928 and the place.