[1] 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.

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.

This meant that during the Russian Civil War, he was responsible for ensuring that grain was collected in areas of the countryside under Bolshevik control, and delivered to towns and for the Red Army, to avert the threat of starvation.

With the factories turning out fewer goods that peasant farmers wanted to buy during the disruption caused by war, and paper money being of little value, from 1918 Tsiurupa was organised dozens of armed detachments from the towns who went out and seized grain.

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.

Victor Serge, who met him during the civil war, and was astonished to hear Tsiurupa claim that there was no black market in food, described him as "a man with a splendid white beard and candid eyes ... but he was a captive in offices whose occupants had obviously all primed him with lies.

[9] On 20 March 2023 the Russian occupiers of Oleshky reinstated the name "Tsiurupynsk" for the town; the reason given was that it was "part of the reversal of the renamings committed after the coup d'état in Kyiv.