His father was a petty employee (secretary of the Town Council) in Aleshki, Tavrida Gubernia. Alexander was born in 1870, the same year as Ilyich. Theirs had been a large family of eight; his father died early, his mother made a living by sewing, and Alexander started giving lessons at an early age. He went to a primary school, then the town school and the secondary agricultural school. By profession he was an agronomist, and was familiar with rural economy and peasant life. He was first imprisoned for being a revolutionary in 1893, and was arrested again in 1895. Beginning from 1897 he worked as a statistician in Ufa. There he belonged to a group of Social-Democrats who did active work among the railway workers and the workers of the neighbouring factories. We had worked together there. He met Ilyich once or twice in Ufa when Ilyich came to see me, and afterwards we regularly corresponded. He wrote for Iskra. We knew him as a convinced ardent revolutionary. In 1901 he had organized a May Day strike in Kharkov, and in 1902 had worked in Tula in a group of which Sophia Smidovich, Weresayev and Lunacharsky's brother had been members. In 1902 he was arrested in Samara, and 1905 found him working again in Ufa.
Beginning from 1914 Tsyurupa began to take an active part again in revolutionary Bolshevik work. Ilyich, who was an excellent judge of people, thought very highly of him. He was an extremely modest man, neither orator nor writer, but a splendid organizer, a practical man who knew his business and was familiar with the village. At the same time he was a splendid revolutionary, who was not afraid of difficulties, and threw himself wholeheartedly into the job of whose significance he was fully aware. He worked under the direction of Ilyich, who appreciated him, took care of his health. Seeing him tired and overworked Ilyich, half in jest, half in earnest, reprimanded him for not taking proper care of "state property" (our domestic slang term for devoted Communists). Ilyich liked Alexander Tsyurupa as a comrade too.
The Soviet Government's food policy at the time consisted in the organization of a grain monopoly, that is, prohibition of all private trade in grain, compulsory deliveries of surplus grain to the state at fixed prices, the prohibition of hoarding, strict stock-taking of all surpluses of grain, the proper transportation of grain from places where there was a surplus to places where there was a shortage, and the laying in of stocks for consumption and sowing. Strictly speaking, this was a section of planned economy, socialist economy, but it had to be practised under conditions when the very foundations of that economy had not yet been reorganized, when peasant farming still remained uncollectivized.
On July 29-30, 1919, the Moscow Soviet and the Moscow Trade-Union Council called a conference of factory committees, representatives of trade-union head offices, delegates of the Moscow Central Workers' Cooperative Society, and the "Kooperatsia" Society Council to organize a united consumers' society in Moscow. The conference was attended also by Mensheviks and supporters of the independent cooperative movement. Vladimir Ilyich spoke at this conference on July 30; he wished the conference success in its work, but stressed that everything depended upon whether we would win the civil war and remodel the social system on new lines, as only this could give the cooperative movement the right direction.
He said that it was only twenty months since the October Socialist Revolution had taken place, and, naturally, that was too short a time in which to remodel the whole social system. Ilyich said that it was necessary to get the better not only of the old institutions, not only of the landowners and the capitalists, but also of the old habits bred by capitalism and the conditions of small peasant economy, habits which had grown into the very bones of the petty proprietor in the course of centuries.
Today, when collective farming has become the predominant form of agriculture in our country, everyone understands what Lenin had been driving at. He had talked about replacing individual farming by collective farming. He said that a last and decisive battle was being waged between capitalism and socialism, that only the victory of socialism could help once and for all do away with hunger, exploitation, and the profiting of one from the labour of another. He spoke about the Bolsheviks having started on the path of socialist grain collection for supplying the Red Army and the working-class population. These grain purchases during the first year amounted to only thirty million poods.
"The next year," said Ilyich, "we laid in over 107 million poods, despite the fact that we had been much worse off in a military respect and in respect of free access to the richer grain-producing territories, as we were cut off effectively from the Ukraine and the greater part of the south as well as Siberia. Nevertheless, as you see, our grain purchases have trebled. From the point of view of the work of our food supply organizations this is a great success, but from the point of view of providing the nonagricultural areas with grain this is very little, because when a careful check-up of food conditions among the nonagricultural population and, especially, the working-class population in the towns, was made, it was discovered that in the spring and summer of this year the worker in the towns received approximately only half his food from the People's Commissariat of Food Supply and was obliged to get the rest on the free market and from profiteers, paying in the first case only a tenth of all his expenses, and in the latter case nine-tenths. The profiteers, as may have been expected, are making the worker pay nine times more than the price the state charges for this bread. Considering these exact data showing our food situation, we must admit that we are still half in old capitalism, with one foot there, and have only half climbed out of this morass, this quagmire of profiteering and taken the path of really socialist collections of grain, when grain has ceased to be a commodity, an object of profiteering and an object and cause for squabbling, for fighting, and for the impoverishment of many."
Ilyich went on to say:
"A decisive and final struggle is now going on against capitalism and free trade, and for us it is now a battle royal between capitalism and socialism. If we win this fight there will be no return any more to capitalism and the old order, to all that has been." (My italics.-N.K.) (Works, Vol. 29, pp. 481-82, 487.)
In a number of speeches made in 1919 Ilyich explained to the working men and women, the peasants and Red Army men the meaning and significance of the Soviet Government's food policy and spoke about collective farming. Experience has confirmed the correctness of the policy that was then pursued.
Besides his concern for providing grain for the Red Army Ilyich was constantly thinking how to strengthen the ranks of the Red Army and raise its discipline. He believed that the best way of doing this was to reinforce the ranks of the Red Army, made up mostly of peasants, with workers. That is why he so warmly greeted the Petrograd workers who were going to the front, into the thick of the fight, and he greeted the Moscow workers for the same reason. He relied upon the workers, attached tremendous importance to their advancement to posts of authority in the capacity of commissars and army commanders. He called upon the Red Army men to be unremittingly vigilant. In a letter to the workers and peasants in connection with the victory over Kolchak, Ilyich warned:
"...The landlords and capitalists have not been destroyed and do not consider themselves vanquished; every intelligent worker and peasant sees, knows and realizes that they have only been beaten and have gone into hiding, are lying low, very often disguising themselves by a 'Soviet' ',protective' colouring. Many landlords have wormed their way into state farms, and capitalists into various 'chief administrations' and 'centres,' acting the part of Soviet officials; they are watching every step of the Soviet Government for it to make a mistake or show weakness, so as to overthrow it, to help the Czechoslovaks today and Denikin tomorrow.
"Everything must be done to track down these bandits, these landlords and capitalists who are lying low, and to ferret them out, no matter what guise they take, to expose them and punish them ruthlessly, for they are the worst foes of the working people, skilful, shrewd and experienced, who are patiently waiting for an opportune moment to set a conspiracy going; they are saboteurs, who stop at no crime to injure the Soviet power. We must be merciless towards these enemies of the working people, towards the landlords, capitalists, saboteurs and Whites.
"And in order to be able to catch them we must be skilful, careful and class-conscious, we must watch out most attentively for the least disorder, for the slightest deviation from the conscientious observance of the laws of the Soviet power. The landlords and capitalists are strong not only because of their knowledge and experience and the assistance they get from the richest countries in the world, but also because of the force of habit and the ignorance of the broad masses, who want to live in the 'good old way' and do not realize how essential it is that the laws of the Soviet power be strictly and conscientiously observed." (Works, Vol. 29, pp. 514-15.)
This call for vigilance frightened many people. Many a story was told to Ilyich of how the Red Army men sometimes dealt with one or another capable commander only because he was "one of the gentry," or because some order of his was not to their liking, or on some other trivial excuse. All this was told to Ilyich with a sneer, as much as to say: "There are your fine Red Army men for you!"
Of course, there were many cases of men being blamed not for what they ought to be blamed, or blamed for something someone else had done; people were prevented from seeing things right by lack of knowledge, by the small-proprietor criterion of what was good and what was bad, by an anarchic approach to a number of questions. Ilyich kept hard at us educational workers, demanding that we should develop wider educational activities among the adult workers, peasants and Red Army men, that we should not handle this business in a formal official manner, but should broaden the horizon of our adult pupils, infuse the spirit of Party into all our teaching. He demanded that we should by every means in our power open the door to higher education to those for whom it had been previously closed.
It was in 1919 that a number of decrees were issued throwing open for all the door to the higher educational institutions. Workers' Faculties were organized, numerous workers' courses were set up, and the first Soviet-Party School was organized in 1919.
