Alexander Tsiurupa

Alexander Dmitriyevich Tsiurupa (; — 8 May 1928) was a Bolshevik revolutionary and Soviet politician.

Biography Alexander Tsiurupa was born in Oleshky, in Taurida Governorate, Russian Empire (now Ukraine). His father was an official. After graduating from a local school, in 1887 he enrolled in the Kherson Agricultural Institute, but in 1893 was arrested and expelled for distributing anti-government literature. He worked as a statistician and agronomist, but in 1895 was arrested again. After his release, he moved to Ufa, where he joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) when it was founded, in 1898, made contact with railway workers, and met Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin's in 1900. After Lenin had launched the newspaper Iskra, Tsiurupa became an Iskra agent, in Ufa and, from 1901, in Kharkiv. In 1902, he was arrested and sentenced to three years exile in Olonets. He returned to Ufa in November 1904, and worked as a manager on the estates of Prince Vyacheslav Kugushev, During the 1905 Revolution, Tsiurupa helped organise strikes, and an underground printing press. He did, though, concede that sometimes the brigades copied the behaviour of the tsarist police. The historian Orlando Figes describes the activities of these detachments as a "battle for grain ... with the brigades using terror to squeeze out the stocks and the peasants counteracting them with passive resistance and outright revolt" including about 200 violent clashes between peasants and grain collectors in July to August 1918 alone.

The detachments were disbanded with the introduction of the New Economic Policy in 1921, after which Tsiurupa was responsible for introducing a new tax system of tax in kind, when Russia lacked a stable currency.

There is a story that while travelling by train to organise the seizure of grain, Tsiurupa fainted from hunger. This may just be a myth.

Tsiurupa was Deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Commissar of the Russian Federation in 1921–23. In 1922, he was made head of Rabkrin, succeeding Joseph Stalin, who was appointed General Secretary of the Communist Party – although when Stalin was running Rabkrin, he and Tsiurupa clashed over the issue of food supplies, and Rabrkin did an audit of Tsiurupa's department, which found that it was “very imperfect, cumbersome, expensive, works poorly, (and) requires significant urgent measures” – a view apparently not shared by Lenin.

Tsiurupa died on May 8, 1928, in Mukhalatka village, Crimea) at the age of 57. His ashes were brought buried at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. His birthplace, Oleshky, was renamed Tsiurupinsk in 1928, but reverted in 2016 to its original name.