Sergei Ivanovich Syrtsov

Born July 17, 1893, in Slavgorod, in what is now Dnepropetrovsk Oblast; died Sept. 10, 1937. Soviet state and party figure. Member of the Communist Party from 1913. The son of a clerk, Syrtsov began his studies at the St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute in 1912. He disseminated Social Democratic propaganda, for which he was arrested on several occasions and exiled to Irkutsk Province in 1916. After the February Revolution of 1917 he worked in Petrograd and then in Rostov-on-Don.

Syrtsov was a delegate to the Sixth Congress of the RSDLP(B). In October 1917 he became chairman of the Rostov-Nakhichevan soviet and joined the Rostov-Nakhichevan committee of the RSDLP(B) and the Military Revolutionary Committee in Rostov-on-Don. From 1918 to 1920 he was a member of the Don Bureau and the Don Committee of the RCP(B) and deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Don Soviet Republic. He was a member of the Don Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP(B). Syrtsov served in the Civil War of 1918–20.

In 1920 and 1921, Syrtsov was secretary of the Odessa Provincial Committee of the ACP(B). He helped suppress the Kronstadt Anti-Soviet Rebellion of 1921. From 1921 to 1926 he worked in the Central Committee of the ACP(B), and in 1924 he became editor of the journal Kommunisticheskaia revoliutsiia (Communist Revolution). From 1926 to 1929 he was secretary of the Siberian Krai Committee of the ACP(B), and from 1929 to 1930, chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the RSFSR. Beginning in 1931, Syrtsov was engaged in managerial administrative and economic work.

Syrtsov was a delegate to the Ninth through Sixteenth Congresses of the ACP(B). At the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Congresses he was elected a candidate member of the Central Committee, and at the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Congresses he was elected a committee member. In 1929 and 1930 he was a candidate member of the Politburo of the Central Committee. In 1930, Syrtsov was removed from the Central Committee for promoting factionalization.

Syrtsov was awarded the Order of the Red Banner.