Tsiurupa, Aleksandr

Tsiurupa, Aleksandr Dmitrievich

 

Born Sept. 19 (Oct. 1), 1870, in the city of Aleshki (now Tsiurupinsk); died May 8, 1928, in the village of Mukhalatka, now included in the settlement of Oliva, Crimean Oblast. Soviet state and party figure. Member of the Communist Party from 1898.

The son of a civil servant, Tsiurupa entered the Kherson Agricultural School in 1887, where he helped organize a Marxist circle among the students in 1891; he was arrested in 1893 and 1895. He worked as a statistician in Simbirsk (now Ul’ianovsk) and Ufa, where in February 1900 he met V. I. Lenin. Tsiurupa was an Iskra agent (seeISKRA AGENTS). In 1901 he served as a member of the Kharkov committee of the RSDLP and carried out party work in Tula and in Tambov Province. He was arrested in 1902 and exiled to Olonets Province the following year.

Tsiurupa took part in the Revolution of 1905–07 in Ufa. He obtained a position as an agronomist in 1908 and became a member of the food administration of Ufa Province in 1915; he carried out assignments from the Central Committee of the RSDLP ro raise money for the party. After the February Revolution of 1917 he was a member of the presidium of the Ufa united committee of the RSDLP and of the Ufa soviet and served as chairman of the provincial food committee and the municipal duma; in October 1917 he became a member of the military revolutionary committee.

Tsiurupa was named deputy people’s commissar of food of the RSFSR in November 1917, and he became commissar in February 1918. During the Civil War of 1918–20 he was responsible for supplying the Red Army, and he directed the operations of the Food Requisitioning Army (seeFOOD APPROPRIATION DETACHMENTS). He helped establish the committee of the poor.

In December 1921, Tsiurupa was named deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars and of the Council of Labor and Defense of the RSFSR (from 1922, of the USSR); in 1922 and 1923 he held the additional post of people’s commissar of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate. From 1923 to 1925 he was chairman of the State Planning Commission (Gosplan) of the USSR, and in 1925 he became people’s commissar for foreign and internal trade of the USSR.

Tsiurupa was a delegate to the Tenth and the Twelfth through Fifteenth Congresses of the ACP(B) and became a member of the party’s Central Committee in 1923. From 1922 to 1928 he was a member of the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and Central Executive Committee of the USSR. Tsiurupa is buried in Red Square, by the wall of the Kremlin.

WORKS

“Vladimir Il’ich i prodovol’stvennaia politika.” In Vospominaniia o V. I. Lenine, vol. 3. Moscow, 1969.
“Zadachi Gosplana po metodologii perspektivnogo planirovaniia na piatiletie.” Planovoe khoziaistvo, 1971, no. 1.

REFERENCES

Lenin, V. I. Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed. (See Index Volume, part 2, p. 483.)
Krzhizhanovskii, G. M. “A. D. Tsiurupa.” In Izbrannoe. Moscow, 1957.
Davydov, M. I. A. D. Tsiurupa. Moscow, 1961.
Krasil’shchikov, V. I. Intendant revoliutsii. [Moscow, 1968.]
Pisarenko, E. E. “Zamestitel’ predsedatelia Sovnarkoma.” Voprosy istorii, 1971, no. 7.
Strizhkov, Iu. K., and V. I. Tsiurupa, “A. D. Tsiurupa.” Istoriia SSSR, 1971, no. 3.

S. G. STRUMILIN and E. E. PISARENKO