Sergey Ivanovich Syrtsov ( – 10 September 1937) was a Russian Soviet politician and statesman. Syrtsov is best remembered for having served as the head of the republic government of the Russian SFSR from 1929 until his removal in 1930 for plotting to remove of Joseph Stalin as head of the All-Union Communist Party (bolsheviks).
Syrtsov was arrested in the spring of 1937 during the Great Purge and was executed about five months later.
Biography
Early years
Sergey Ivanovich Syrtsov was born in Slavgorod, Ekaterinoslav guberniia, Imperial Russia (now part of Ukraine) on 17 July 1895 (5 July Old Style) to a middle-class family of ethnic Russian extraction. Syrtsov's father, Ivan Syrtsov, was a minor local government employee.
Syrtsov attended university in St. Petersburg at Saint Petersburg State Polytechnical University where he became politically active, jointing the Bolshevik Party in 1913. In 1916 for his political activities ran afoul of the Okhrana (secret police) and Syrtsov was arrested, expelled from school, and sent into internal exile in the region of Verkolensk in Irkutsk, eastern Siberia. He was released from exile following the February Revolution of 1917, which was marked by a release of political prisoners.
Syrtsov was an active participant in the October Revolution in which the Bolsheviks overthrew the Russian Provisional Government of Alexander Kerensky, heading the local Military Revolutionary Committee in the city of Rostov-on-Don during the revolt.
Provincial Bolshevik leader
At the time of the Bolshevik Revolution in November 1917, Syrtsov was based in Rostov-on-Don. As a member of the regional military revolutionary committee, he led a punitive expedition against Don Cossacks who opposed the Bolsheviks. In March 1918, he was appointed deputy chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the short-lived Don Soviet Republic. He was appointed to the committee in charge of "Decossackization" of the Don region in December 1918 and participated in activity to break up the rural settlements of the Don Cossacks due to their hostility to the Bolshevik regime. During the Russian Civil War, he served as a political commissar in the 12th Army of the Red Army, from 1918 to 1919. He was wounded during the fighting and awarded the Order of the Red Banner. In 1920, he was appointed secretary of the Odesa provincial party committee
In the years immediately after the revolution, Syrtsov took positions which placed himself on the left wing of the Bolshevik Party, including opposition to the Brest-Litovsk Treaty in March 1918. He was a delegate to the 10th Congress of the RKP(b) in March 1921, where he backed Leon Trotsky, against Lenin in the dispute over the role of the trade unions. He also participated along with other delegates to the gathering in crushing the Kronstadt Rebellion. This experience moved Syrtsov in a more moderate direction economically, and he became an early and vocal supporter of the New Economic Policy (NEP) advanced by Lenin over radical opposition from within Bolshevik ranks. After the Congress, Lenin intervened to secure Syrtsov's appointment as head of the secretary of the communist party in the Donbas region, against opposition from leaders of the Ukrainian party because of Syrtsov's previous support, which he promised to renounce.
National party functionary
In 1921 Syrtsov was moved to Moscow to work in the expanding state bureaucracy. He was made head of the Communist Party's Records and Assignments Section (Uchraspred) in July 1921, an institution which was dedicated to the task of maintaining party personnel files. Syrtsov established a system of accumulating individual records on file cards and played a key role in the establishment of the nomenklatura system of appointment of trusted officials to low level office by central authority.
Following the appointment of Joseph Stalin as General Secretary in April 1922, Uchraspred's work was carefully supervised by Stalin's Secretariat and a close working relationship between Syrtsov and Stalin was developed for the first time. Syrtsov attended meetings of the party's Organization Bureau (regarded as the bulwark of Stalin's growing factional strength) and participated with Stalin in the appointment of key personnel. The shared agenda of the two in this period was emphasized by the fact that Stalin and Syrtsov shared adjoining offices in the Kremlin.
Syrtsov was moved in 1924 to the position of chief of the Central Committee's Agitation and Propaganda department, later becoming a member of the Presidium of the Communist Academy and editor of the VKP(b) Central Committee's magazine, Communist Revolution.