During 1930, the government ordered the printing of millions of paper rubles to finance the rapid industrialisation of the Soviet economy.

This created a situation in which peasant farmers and others with goods to sell insisted on being paid with coins rather than paper money.

[6] He was supported by the head of the State Bank, Georgy Pyatakov, but angered Stalin, who drew an obscene cartoon during a meeting of the Politburo on 5 April 1930, with the caption: "For all his sins, past and present, hang Bryukhanov by the balls.

"[7] In July 1930, Leonid Yurovsky, a leading economist employed by the Commissariat of Finance was arrested and accused of being a member of a non-existent "Peasants Labour Party", led by Nikolai Kondratiev, and was later shot.

[8] In letter to Vyacheslav Molotov, written at about the same time as Yurovsky's arrest, Stalin claimed that it was Yurovsky, and not Bryukhanov, who ran the commissariat, and instructed: It is thus important to a) fundamentally purge the Finance and Gosbank bureaucracy, despite the wails of dubious Communists like Bryukhanov-Pyatakov; b) definitely shoot two or three dozen wreckers from these apparaty, including several dozen common cashiers.

Bryukhanov was replaced with Grigori Fyodorovich Grinko[10] and appointed Deputy Chairman of the executive committee of the Moscow Oblast Soviet.