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.
